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Because, yeah. I briefly mentioned Custom Stages last time, and I'm not going to leave anybody hanging for that. It's time to discuss custom stages. Brawl was the first to include them, so I'll start with that. It included 3 themes and stage sizes. I almost always chose the biggest stage, and most of mine take the futuristic background. There were standard blocks, platforms, diagonal platforms or terrain, moving platforms, etc. There was ice, springs, ladders, conveyor belts, and spikes; so many spikes. There were other features directly related to the theme. There were mushrooms, pillars, and other interesting terrain parts. It was fun and all. I've made many stages on it, be it from my own gaming imagination, ideas from others, or just something extremely stupid. That still happens. I have some video game ideas, and my own characters and story line and whatnot, but I'll just say I am not fond of creating dialogue. But that's not important here. point is, I could use this for stage ideas. I've made a pyramid, a frozen-over pyramid, a cliffside, a highway (the best highway), a train (with moving wheels), a plain, a space shutter (I don't care how outdated something like that is), a volcano valley, a space base, and space fights involving stations and drones. The last one, is my most iconic, as it became a thing after making it; a little meme if you will. It was called The Black Hole. Simply a square-ish spiral, that's all it was. Put some platforms here and there so people could be able to move around freely. Why is it so iconic? It does pretty much what the name implies. While it doesn't actually suck people in towards there dooms, people tend to hang around in the middle, as it's hard to get rid of them there, whereas outside is very dangerous. This was so awful, we did a 3-player 5 stock match that lasted for 53 minutes. Temporary alliances had to be made in order for that to happen. If there was no "teaming," it would've been much longer. So, custom stages were fun and all, but it wasn't enough. One thing I want to point out is the weight system. I don't know why they put it in there instead of making the limit be the grid space you have. What's worse is that the weight limit is the same per stage size. What's funny about that is, you can fill an entire small stage up but not use all the weight you were allowed to. The system was clearly flawed. Now lets talk about things I wanted in custom stages. I would've wanted access to all of the backgrounds instead of being limited to 3. They allow you to look at all the music, so I don't see much a problem with that. As for the music, allowing stages to have multiple tunes would be nice as well. Now lets get to the main stuff. The features I wanted in custom stages that would be cool. I wanted teleportation devices that would take a player from one teleported to another, like warp pipes. Those were used in the new Pictochat 2 stage. We could also have made them doors. Having a stage be autoscrolling would be cool too, and having it loop. Having boxes that contain items like the ? boxes. Having item generators instead of the locations being random. Maybe having them spawn only one of an item, maybe the ability to change their frequency of dropping an item and frequency of dropping certain items. I thought about adding lava, being able to rotate spikes 45 degrees, and even add water. Some water combat could be cool instead of just swimming. Being able to decide the path for moving platforms, be it diagonals or corners, along with their speed and size. I would've like more with ice, like giving it some slopes as well. Changing the height of springs, being able to rotate springs 45 degrees, making bumpers a stage hazard like in SSB. Making platforms or other obstacles breakable. Being able to determine whether a platform is soft, semisoft, hard, or super-soft. There was so much, some of which I'm probably forgetting. SSBU came out, and I was excited to try it out now that lava was a thing, stage building was a lot more free as far as platforms went, cannons, etc. Unfortunately, quick a bit of the old features didn't return, like ice, ladders, conveyor belts, and spikes. However, lava kinda takes care of the spikes. The stages are now even bigger than before, and there's greater precision. Greater range of angles too. More backgrounds, completely unique. There's the sky, a volcanic area, the sea, space, and a toy area. Ground textures can also be changed based on the theme, along with 2 that appear in every background. I recreated all of my older classic older stages in a new glory with new freedom. The pyramid is big, the cliffside is rigid with a cannon leading up, the highway is like usual, but now with platforms, the train now has the furnace in front and more train cars, the plane has jets, the shuttle has thrusters and there are meteors, the volcano now has lava and vents, the space base now has orb windows, the space station with turrets, the drones have flames from their thrusters, and the black hole... just got more broken. The black hole went through a few variations: a crude spiral with cannons and lava, a crooked spiral that broke the game (you know what I mean. No disc damage or game crashes), and then a descent black hole. I even decided to add the original one by doing some math. Other stages include Galaga pixel art, The PAC-Maze, and even a Portal stage by making cannons shoot through walls. But, again, there are still problems. The weight system still exists, but it's not a bad as last time. however, adding lava is a problem. It can't insta-kill at 100% like in The Great Cave Offensive, can only be added to surfaces, and even if it's not on a surface, it still weighs down the stage, which is ridiculous. Like I mentioned before, some features were taken out. All there is is springs, cannons, lava, and moving platforms. There's a small and big variant for each. Also, for some reason you can't make platforms at 45 degrees anymore. Now, new ideas have come to my head. Still wanting the platform differentiation, along with adding vertical platforms/walls. Soft ones you can walk through one way, but have to dash to get through the other way. Semisoft would only be one way. Standard walls already exist. Super-soft ones would be for decoration, I guess? I still want the old features back, still want more backgrounds and multiple music choices. I want the undo button to only undo the last line you made instead of treating it all as a polyline (AutoCAD terms if you don't know what that is). Then one little mistake wouldn't force me to start all over again. Adding angle/slope tools. It's unfortunate that a line with a slope of 1/45 doesn't make a 1 degree angle with the X axis. Trigonometry (the concept, not the class) did this to me. Anyways, it's a lot of stuff, I probably left some things out. Tell me what you think of my ideas, features and actual stages, and tell me your own feature/stage ideas you have.

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