VLDC13 - Piscine Molitor

Rank: 13th out of 85 entries.
This is my entry for Vanilla Level Design Contest 13, a contest on SMWCentral where participants have to make a level using all the resources aside a SMW rom without adding any ASM. Only exceptions are custom music as well as a few modifications of SMW graphics (e.g. merging, rotating tiles).
The main gimmick of the level involves a common glitch of SMW: a sprite is killed when it is in contact with a top lava tile with buoyancy enabled, contrary to Mario and some carriable sprites (spring, key, baby Yoshi ...) which is often used for sprite filters. I wanted to explore this idea more throughoutly: the 'top lava tile' is used as a dark water in the level, while the light water is normal water. I used the glitch to make a serie of puzzles, with a focus on smashing layer 2 for the second half and the moon room. The level name is a reference of a swimming pool complex in Paris, France. Both the title screen of the entry (not shown here) and the layer 3 palette were taken from previous cancelled works.
Contrary to most of my entries, this level took me almost all the submission period to finish it: I started it in the first days of the contest but didn't work on it during almost 2 weeks because of a lack of ideas to make interesting puzzles. The koopa shell and column of fishes room as well as the star and baby Yoshi room were made at the last moment since the original rooms I made weren't good. While not shown in the video, the first room of the second half has an alcove at the right while reveals a door to the end of the level once the player passes through hidden 1-UP checkpoint at the end room.
At the end, I'm still surprised the entry gets almost into the top 10 with a lot of very good scores (and a rather low score, but I didn't make the level to win so that's fair :P) since I honestly didn't how it would fare in the contest. A good start for my first VLDC I guess.
Music: 3D Dot Game Heroes - Water Temple (ported by Wyatt)