What's up dudes.So, at first I wasn't keen on having the "legal alt" for bowsers. The thought being, if we have a legal alt, then nobody is ever going to play my thwompy version, and that's unfortunate. However, the only time that I personally play Project M is at various tournaments... and so that means that the only time I ever saw Bowser's Castle being played was when I'm up against someone that will no doubt beat me in bracket. Flip the match to a more casual lolfun setting instead of me just getting pummled. (I'm an artist, not a playtester. My job is to make the game pretty, not balance itSo, after only seeing Bowser's Castle get played maybe 8 times during the 3.6 beta we decided to include the competitive version. My thoughts were that I had spent a huge amount of time on this stage, and that it's unfortunate that the competitive crowd doesn't get to utilize that at all.There was a lot of discussion behind the scenes on where we should put the stages... should the thwompy version be on the alt? Should the legal version be on the alt? We were pretty split on it, and so we ended up adding the legal as the alt. With our next release these will most likely be switched around though for Random Stage Select purposes and consistency with a lot of the other stages.So, all of that out of the way... My favorite custom stages?When I first started out in this community I saw that the majority of stages that people were posting on the Brawl Vault were just reskins of Brawl/Melee/N64 stages.... and I thought that was pretty lame. I wasn't as competitive back then, so I didn't really understand the reasoning behind it at the time, but I just figured that I want to have more new experiences in the game, rather than just the same gameplay but with a different picture behind it. So that's why I started working on Golden Sun: Venus Lighthouse, and that's why I made the layout the way that it is. It's a pretty damn unique layout and it has some super fun moments when you're both trying to spike each other down the pit that opens up in the middle, and then the spiked player tries to walljump his way back out before it closes on him. Stuff like that I thought was super neat. It's casual as all hell, but I thought it was a really fun mechanic. Plus, I play Ivysaur, and that stage was designed and tweaked around that super unfairly. I've nicknamed that stage "Ivysaur's Playground." The stage was my first stage that I had created, and it shows though... with the slanted walls being where the gameplay takes place... it causes a lot of issues with players not quite knowing where the ledges are. It'd take a decent amount of work to get that stage to a proper level to have it up to the quality bar that we want in the PMDT.I don't mean to toot my own horn here, but my other favorite stage would be thwompy bowser's castle. Again, I wanted new gameplay experiences... and the way that thwomp creates tension while still being a "fair" hazard makes it for a fun stage to play on. That paired with the idea that the center point of the stage can shift during battle is just interesting to me. The idea that stage control can shift slightly based on part of the map disappearing is interesting to me. It's just a fun stage, and I mean... I poured everything I had into creating it, so it holds a super special place in my heart. I just wish that we could have gotten everything into that stage that we wanted to do. There was a few neat elements that didn't fully get implemented, or got straight up cut out due to framerate issues.... and so that's unfortunate.Bowser's Castle legal alt will most likely be in the main slot in our next release. It was made so that all of the work that went into Bowser's Castle's art would actually have a chance to be appreciated. My own custom stages, Venus Lighthouse and Bowser's Castle are my two favorite custom stages.