Afar Star Skies was a planned course for the Nintendo 64DD port of Super Mario 64. Set in the second floor, it would've been a course set in the sky with several mountainous regions and cloud platfoms to jump across.
From the descriptions given by the anonymous developer who first reported of this build, the level bore resemblence to The Starry-Night Skies, an anomalous level supposedly recorded by several people who have played Super Mario 64. The anonymous developer mentioned that Afar Star Skies was made from the assets of an unused level, which could very well be Starry-Night Skies.
Geography[]
According to the developer, Afar Star Skies was a level that was comprised of large mountains that stretched up from the clouds below, and cloud platforms to jump on. The cloud platforms were presumably much like the ones from Wing Mario Over the Rainbow.
An overhead map of the level, crudely drawn from the developer's memory in MS Paint.
The developer drew a sketch of the level from memory for the thread, being one of the few material recovered from the now deleted threads. The player would start on the bottom most mountain and have to platform across clouds to get to the central mountain. The other mounatins were also accessible through cloud obstacle courses, however the far right one with the mushroom house could only be accessed through shooting over there with a cannon, as marked with the black box on the sketch. The red box is supposed to indicate a wing cap box.
Enemies had not been programmed into the level according to the developer, however a boss was set to appear on the central mountain for the first star. During testing, they simply used a King Whomp. However, hazardous shooting stars similar to the water balloons from Bob-omb Battlefield would rain down upon the player as they explored.
Missions[]
Aside from the first mission that was meant to be a boss on the central mountain, the developer talked about three other missions that were programmed into Afar Star Skies.
- A mission which required Mario to shoot himself over to the mushroom house mountain with a cannon. At the mushroom house, a Toad would be waiting to give Mario a star he claimed "fell from the sky".
- A secrets mission where secrets were hidden across the level. There were bushes on all the mountains, the developer said, and two of the secrets were hid in them.
- A mission that the developer disclosed the name of, CLOUD AT THE SKY EDGE, where Mario would have to acquire the wing cap and fly to the furthest cloud in the stage, as seen on the top left in the sketch.