Just a quick update:
Just had a long night of tweaking shit that had been bothering me on my level for quite a while. Finally made my background layer one piece (a big mistake I made early on...) and it was hell getting some of my level to not fall apart after fixing that shit. Also made my wall turrets work properly (for the most part). Long story short I didn't get much progress done as far as finishing the level but what I did have done was polished. Didn't publish it though for testing yet I'll do that tomorrow (or later today rather).
Anywho, Jaeyden and I had a talk about adding a bonus race at the beginning of each stage. The first time you play through the level it's normal but after beating it, the player is rewarded a special sticker to place on a sticker switch somewhere at the start of each stage that makes a race start appear. I think this would be great for replay value and also prevent people from hording respawned enemies for high scores. We could make the race time really challenging as well.
Another idea we had talked about was making stickers of the various powerups in Contra (M, L, S, etc.). When destroying the powerup pods that float about the stages, the player can collect these for nostalgia reasons, and also on a given stage (I suppose it would make the most sense at the very end of Alien's Lair) you can turn in your stickers you collected to earn some bonus items. It could be either the more stickers you have the more items you get, or you need all the stickers to activate the "secret" and get the bonus items. This would also enhance replay value for the player to go back and find the stickers that they might have missed through the various levels of the game.
Another variation of that same idea is to still have the cool powerup stickers that pop out of the floating pods, but I think as far as those items being the "secret stickers" to find is too easy. In addition to those stickers we should hide 1 or 2 bonus stickers in secret locations/hard to reach spots/whatever for the player to collect and turn them in at the end somewhere.
Feedback on these ideas would be appreciated. Let me know if you guys think it's worth doing.
One thing we haven't talked about yet is the inclusion of point bubbles or not. As far as Contra is concerned they don't really belong, but this is "LittleBig" Contra, so I don't think it would really hurt having point bubbles in certain spots (they would be good to pop out of the wall powerups and powerup pods for example) but it's up to what everyone else thinks. Regardless of whether or not we have point bubbles I think prize bubbles should be in for sure.
Edit: The special hidden prize stickers can be the NeoGAF logo with a number corresponding the the stage number (Ex: 1 for Stage 1: Jungle, and so on).