guys this is really cool
nooo fuck brands who cares
Hey don’t shoot the messenger, it’s not me who you have beef with.
It’s WENDY’S you have BEEF with! Order a famous double stack today for DOUBLE the BEEF!
nah fuck that; i should be able to play mario levels without being advertised to
and if i wanted shitty wendy’s-tier level design i’d just play endless
damn it i had been talking about prototyping almost this i am too slow
sick though
i am loving “wendy’s-tier level design”
A couple Giant Bomb people are going to play user submitted levels, so I recreated one of mine. I don’t recommend that effort, but this could be neat if you’re working on a tough-but-fair course you haven’t already uploaded.
Hello! Many many moons ago I posted very briefly on select button 1 during a year of underpaid employment as a translator at a terrible Japanese game company but as I am not proud (and in some specific cases pretty embarrassed) of my takes I shared during that time I re-emerge with a new username. It is a lovingly emasculating nickname one of my former coworkers gave me that has stuck due to its total appropriateness (i am a real softboi IRL)
So yeah, I bought this mario maker 2 and made a level.
So here’s the elevator pitch (that gets me thrown out by security immediately): It’s the first video game level I have made in my entire life! Also, I have barely even played any other mario maker 2 levels before i started making it! I watched one youtube video about “how to make good mario levels” (in line with the Nintendo design philosophy) and basically said “yeah, eff that” to everything they suggested! (is miyamoto ACTUALLY overrated? y/n)
I am course joking about miyamoto but still: I played a lot of mario as a child at my friends’ houses, but I was a sega kid, and discovering the debug code in sonic 1 by total accident at age 8 probably broke my brain in a totally irrecoverable way.
As a result it has always bothered me that Mario secrets were never really secrets: they were always hermetically sealed rooms unto themselves, that the designers just really really really wanted you to find. In sonic the secrets felt so unfinished—like they were seeping out the side of the game world itself, out a leaky hole the designers forgot to close up. (Sometimes those leaks would even be deadly.)
Those sonic level secrets always had a way of reminding me that I was in a video game. That is a good thing, I think. Like a lot of people here I have a love/hate relationship with video games and other power fantasy media and their hypnotizing effect, so I really appreciate when creators will make the effort to occasionally 4th-wall-break that spell.
So i made the secret in this level like a sonic game—ugly, unfinished, deadly—but because I also, really really wanted people to find it, I made finding my ugly sonic secret a requirement to completing the level. Now it is up to you guys to let me know if I am stuck with two useless baby halves.
Oh, also let me know if the overall level is like, legible. At all. (It is totally un-playtested!)
I have downloaded all of the sber levels posted in this thread to play on the train so I am excited to finally see how much smarter and better and cleverer all of you are than me at this 
I will report back with my findings soon.
Oh right! I almost forgot the code: 07T-W7Y-YDF
It is called (get this): das kapital. Haha yeah… “capital realism” might have been better now that I think about it. I might remake it with that name later after y’all let me know how much it sucks 
(ideally I was aiming for that endearing 7/10 quality we all love, but it is probably more like a 4.)
Any feedback/thoughts appreciated <3
Another prodigal child returns. I am so thrilled
It’s a little frustrating to play! The level is sort of actively hostile to the player, but the platforming doesn’t feel particularly exciting or fast paced, so it becomes a chore where you have to play very cautiously otherwise you have a chance to die at any section.
The part where a spring is bouncing on another spring was particularly tricky. If you hold left just a little too late(?) you’ll hit the top note block and be flung into a spike (and after probably 20+ attempts it still felt a bit random when I died; I eventually got it consistently and I’m not sure what exactly was causing me to hit the note block sometimes and go under it others). If you hold right too long after jumping on to the note block, it will go low enough that you walk into the spike and die. This section seemed relatively innocuous on my first try, but I found all kinds of ways to die on it on subsequent trips.
This level would greatly benefit from checkpoints (which I know aren’t compatible with clear conditions.) I’d suggest trying to rework the level to not use clear conditions; keys or red coins are other ways to force players to find secrets.
On top of that, I think it’s a pretty tall order to ask the player to look for a secret on a mechanically challenging level. It’s tough to want to explore, when straying from the obvious path so often results in death. The first time I got to the boss (after 50+ attempts) I died to the timer after getting Yoshi. I actually think I cheesed it; I did a spin jump on the cloud pipe to get below the clouds, which is not where the arrows were pointing me. I find most Mario Maker levels that try to mix exploration and mechanical challenge are rather painful to play. When you’re playing a level that requires a high level of dexterity, you don’t want to die because you didn’t know where to go. Likewise, when you’re trying to explore you don’t want a high dexterity challenge because it halts your exploration and puts you back at the beginning.
It’s very easy to underestimate difficulty when making levels in Mario Maker. Since you spent so much time on the level, you gain a familiarity with it that a player will almost never reach. Where you get to practice each part in isolation, the player has to play them all sequentially, which makes the learning process MUCH slower.
I like the level visually and structurally. There’s a lot of interesting details, and I like the narrow shafts you have to travel up while you’re surrounded by coins and other unreachable elements.
And I do think the final part of the is pretty neat. Busting the level apart with the clown car and going where you want feels pretty subversive and empowering, but the climb there is so long and arduous and the level plays it so straight up to that point that many players won’t see it, and if they do they may not appreciate the misdirection.
I was getting to the end fairly consistently after about an hour+(?) of play (the hammer bros sections and spiny sections are too chaotic and too low visibility with the vertical camera for me to do with 100% consistency) but then the Nintendo servers went into maintenance so I didn’t get a chance to beat it yet.
Beat it! Yeah, the trick to the spring is to be holding left the first frame you jump off of it, otherwise you’ll hit the note block. It was fine once I knew the trick, because it was pretty simple to buffer the input, but it was baffling before I figured that out.
The other parts were just a matter of replaying them until I got it down consistently enough.
@Gate88 thank you so much for this.
I have noticed the unexpected randomness of the double spring part myself after some more playthroughs. I am thinking the room right after that might be a good place add to a checkpoint, so players only have to manage to get it right once.
The fact that you were able to cheese your way into the cloud pipe led me to an idea for a way to rearrange my levelwithout the set objective. So thank you for that too.
Regarding this:
“It’s a little frustrating to play! The level is sort of actively hostile to the player, but the platforming doesn’t feel particularly exciting or fast paced, so it becomes a chore where you have to play very cautiously otherwise you have a chance to die at any section.”
I am sorry for not being more upfront with my shameful psychological kinks and how they manifested themselves in my level design. Much more than most people who play games I like things that are “frustrating” and “a chore” and find “excitement” a bore and/or patronizing (the excessive use of the fireworks and clapping sounds and the N64 slide music in all of the top rated user levels feels gross in a borderline pornographic way to me).
So yeah I definitely wanted it to be chore-like (using lots of slippery blocks and conveyer belts and other wobbly things and weirdly spaced jumps and weirdly arranged enemies as ways to keep the player constantly off balance). I mean, it is supposed to be a criticism of capitalism, so it is supposed to be kind of a drag?
But then there is the rub: how do you make something a drag but still keep gamers intrigued enough to keep going? Ugh, game design is hard!
So yesterday I played @HOBO’s bowser rocks you in hell. It is one of my favorite Mario maker levels I have played. I also find it interesting that he originally designed it without power ups, like my level, motivated by a similar philosophy (ITS LIKE REAL LIFE). But in the actual exercise of playing his level i got a renewed appreciation of what powerups allow: getting hit with a powerup is still frustrating/punishing in itself, but also doesn’t require the player to start over from scratch. I also still died enough times and lost my power ups at enough different points that I ultimately got hit by every death trap and had to find a way to get past each said death trap w/o damage at least once. So I was still able to experience all of the killer machinations @HOBO had skillfully designed, but ended up being able to beat the level on my 12th-15th try instead of the 100th, and still left feeling like the overall mood and ominousness of the level wasn’t diminished in any way.
So yeah my theme sort of demands that players can’t get any coins or flowers until the very end, but maybe there are some points I can work in a few sparse mushrooms to make the level exponentially more fair and reasonable.
Oh and @gate88: I really admire all of the weird levels you are creating (though I haven’t tried all of them yet). Over the top feels like it was made by an alien. It was everything I hoped for from an sber Mario level. I wish I could work some of these cool glitches into the second half of my level but I’m sure it would just end up breaking it completely.
Thanks again for all of the pointers/detailed feedback and spending so much time playing my level. That was so generous of you.
This is interesting, because I think I have similar “tedious” level design tendencies (check out my levels The Guardian of Fire Bridge or Big Ice Climber or Crawl Space) so I’m trying to figure out what rubbed me the wrong way. I think the first time through the level, it’s extremely easy to hit things that you have almost no time to react to. I think some of this is due to Mario Maker’s poor vertical camera. The thwomp room, the hammer bros room, and the spiny room all have obstacles that come at you fast enough (because you’re already so close to the top of the screen) that you can’t really dodge them (can’t tell you how many times I jumped into spikes in the hammer bros room trying to scramble to avoid a hammer). That on top of the randomness of the hammer throwing, the aforementioned spring setup, and the unpredictability of the spinys on see-saws made it so I couldn’t take the same path every run and had to play slower than I wanted to.
Variability isn’t necessarily a design flaw, and it can even be more engaging than a static level since the player has to react every time to what the level throws at them. I do play roguelikes a lot, which are predicated on variability. It only becomes a problem if the player feels like they’re dying for unfair reasons; I think that’s when most players disengage with a level. I also think “waiting” annoys me more than you, but that’s even more subjective.
