Introducing the concept also helps ensure that you the designer actually understand the concept in some fundamental way. It’s like restating an argument in a college paper so you can argue against it. You’re saying here’s this thing, here’s how I understand it, now watch what I do with it.
1 Like
you ever roll a fat mario
3 Likes
Christ, I’ll have to rework my route.
1 Like
I don’t really like this kind of thinking. yes, there’s is that chance. there’s a far, far, far greater chance that it isn’t, and that’s the chance I’m going to take. that doesn’t mean you throw pacing out the window (though, uhh, my level that’s taking way too long to make and is aggressively mediocre is definitely not well paced!), but we don’t need every mario level to follow the standard nintendo template.
dont let yamamura hear you
2 Likes
Make your mom play your level first before anyone else and see if introducing the concept would be helpful.
Unless your mom is an expert Mario player. I use the nephew that doesn’t play platformers to test mine.
1 Like
I think it can be helpful to decide who your audience is; you don’t necessarily need to introduce the basics unless you’ve been tasked with introductory levels, just as kaizo levels can assume a knowledge of standard advanced techniques and glitches, if not any unique expression of them in this level.
2 Likes
I thought this was the case but then came out Mario Maker 1 and every single level I made, no matter how simple, had tons of deaths from people just walking straight into the first goomba they saw or from walking off cliffs clearly leading to oblivion and I’d get angry comments because people didn’t know how to use doors or not understanding that Super Mario can break bricks with his head.
And this was on a console which probably had a much higher ratio of “hardcore” players than the Switch. Like, I’d think if someone spent $300 to play Mario Maker they’d know to hold B (or Y) to run but uh…a lot of folks didn’t.
Not trying to dissuade you here. I think folks should follow their hearts and such. But boyyy was that game a huge wakeup call. I can’t believe how bad everyone was. Maybe it’s not quite so bad on the Switch? I haven’t gotten any frustrated messages yet at least.
5 Likes
I think thinking in that three-stage kind of logic can be useful for even courses designed for high-level play. You don’t need to introduce jumping or pipes or goombas, but you can still think about your more complex mechanisms in that kind of evolutionary way. Can still help you keep focus and clarity in your onslaught.
3 Likes
Yeah, I have been trying very hard to make my levels entirely possible to complete without ever holding the run button, which is simultaneously maddening and also a really helpful design constraint to encourage a creative approach to adding challenge to my levels.
1 Like
these are things that never occurred to me 
I am a fairly terrible player, but that can mean a lot of different things. not knowing how to break a brick or run doesn’t make you a bad mario player, necessarily, it makes you an ignorant one. I can’t fathom how you’d have played mario in the past and not picked those things up, so maybe that subsection would qualify as bad, but if you don’t have the vocab then you don’t have it. those players should probably not start with mario maker. or at least do the story mode, which while looser than your standard nintendo fair still manages to have that design ethos ingrained in it. I’m ok with making a stage that someone who has no idea what mario is would be heavily inclined to skip. depends on what I’m going for. for instance, I think this:
is nonsensical if you’re just making a standard platform level. but if you’re making a level designed specifically around that mechanic, and then go out of your way to enforce it (which is all the clear conditions do), then that qualifies as an Idea. or maybe you’re making a puzzle level, at which point the platform mechanics can be of little consequence. but I am not going to make a platform level that becomes trivial and sloppy as soon as a player who knows what a controller is shows up.
when you talk about someone being ‘bad’ at platformer, what you’re mainly talking about is consistency. outside of fringe kaizo stuff, there aren’t any difficult platforming mechanics. most anyone can beat a difficult platforming level, because the goals are graspable and the mechanics are accessible. but many people won’t complete those levels, because they’re going to fail a jump 8 times out of 10 that some degenerate kaizo streamer will nail 19 times out of 20. and that extends all the way down the difficulty chain. I’d venture that most players will occassionally die to the first goomba in just about any level. I die to dumb shit in mario games all the time, but I can still beat difficult levels.
No jsnlxndrlv’s method is incredibly sound because I am playing tons of standard platforming levels that expect me to be running at full speed over multiple short platforms in order to avoid instant death and it’s almost always unpleasant.
I’ll never forget the day I met someone who didn’t like to run in Mario games. It was horrifying. But God there are a buncha people like that and I think it’s fine not making levels catered to them but almost every time I’ve taken folks like that into consideration I’ve ended up with a stronger level.
5 Likes
Yeah, make levels for the audience you want to cater to, obviously, but Nintendo themselves had a lot to say on this subject in Yamamura’s Dojo:
2 Likes
i feel like the day i truly became an adult is the day i realized you don’t have to run all the time in mario sometimes it is good to walk
3 Likes
Reuploaded Illegal Technique: Over the Top without the softlock (thanks @dmauro for finding that).
7JY-DPW-VRF
Finally home from work so I’m going to play all the cool levels y’all made today!
3 Likes
This is my wife. She has beaten the original SMB, we’ve played a ton of Mario World, NSMB, and SMB3, and she’s pretty good! But she still walks most of the time
Also she sometimes holds up when she jumps, so putting doors right where someone should be jumping causes her problems.
Lots of people play Mario and all of them play it real weird
BTW I’m the person dying on the first goomba because I won’t let myself finish a level until I feel like I’m at least competing for the world record so I retry it 100 times and inevitably die to the stupidest thing from sheer fatigue
1 Like
this post is several different topics, though. “the maker of this course didn’t have a clear vision” means the stage is cluttered and nonsensical. the difficulty is a symptom of that, used in place of design. there is no thought put into the level’s pacing or its aesthetic sensibility. mario’s mechanics are ill considered. the design is lost. “When [players] make mistakes, it’s your duty as a maker to give them a second chance,” is not a statement on difficulty, it is a statement on fairness and design cohesion. if you ask the player to do something difficult, it’s good practice to think it through. put a checkpoint. give them several options. have them fail in a way that hints at success. if you’re using a one time mechanic like a pswitch or falling lifts, either kill the player when they fail, give them another way to complete the section, or only put those mechanics as an alternate route/a method to find secrets.
that’s basically the entire design philosophy behind mario 2j.
it’s good to think about why you have what you have in a level. if there’s a pit, there should be a reason for a pit. the easiest reason is to force the player to think about the game’s mechanics. if you have a long pit that requires a precise jump with speed, then the player’s mind is focused on the level design as obstacle. so give them obstacles and pleasant ways to move through them. if you have to go fast, going fast should be fun. it should be tight. you shouldn’t be distracted by other things. if a jump is easy, the jump shouldn’t be the focus of the player’s attention, which means you need another focus. you don’t want to split things too much. if you have a puzzle in a level, you shouldn’t combine that puzzle with difficult mechanics during the solving phase, because then you split the player’s focus, which leads to frustration. no one likes failing platforming mechanics in a puzzle game, because it makes it hard to work out whether or not you found the correct solution. did you just fuck up the execution, or are you on the wrong idea altogether? it’s not fun to ask that question. put the mechanical part in a place that guarantees the player already has the solution to the puzzle worked out.
I have a part in my vertical level where the sky theme transitions to ice. cloud blocks are replaced by ice blocks, and I use some icicles. I felt like doing this because I thought it would be sort of neat to show vertical progression in this manner, as a slight story telling touch. it’s not a particularly complicated, strong, or consequential idea, but it’s an idea nonetheless. I try to emphasize this slight aesthetic idea by dialing back the platforming difficulty during the transition, so that it’s more noticeable. there’s a lot you can do along those lines in a video game.
6 Likes
Where are your levels @geist???
as in all things, I am very slow. I have one level, and it’s not finished. it’s too long and half assed. I want to move on to other ideas, but I’m going to soldier on.
can you even work on multiple levels at once?