Rinse and repeat

In the last couple of days I’ve been tweaking two levels, a puzzle oriented one similar to the Olimar themed ones I uploaded, and a second one which can be seen as a big variant of my Flying Tomb level.

The first one is currently stuck, I haven’t figured an elegant way of making it less taxing, it feels quite long to do in one breath, but it’s hard to cut because it only features two hazards and the starting one is short and slowpaced.

The idea behind the second level was to repeat the same kind of hazard several times, small variants of the same idea, with potential short cuts and pacing. This is the first level I conceived with check points. Originally I wanted to do two halves, the second one featuring easier hazarads but automatic scrolling. But when I started playing it in order to publish it I figured it just wasn’t… fun.

So I quickly dismissed the hardest parts of the level and those that were filling in between my thematic zones. Trimming down the filler I focused in my original idea. The first half became smaller and easier since the goal was to inform the player of how the recurring hazard worked.

Reloads

So after being mostly inactive during my vacations I came back to find two of my courses had been erased. I decided to call this dilemma an opportunity and uploaded two new short courses with the Olimar costume, which I will discuss in a later date. Then just today Nintendo decided to drop another two of my levels, so I decided to take the latest Mario Maker update to make the reupload worth it. In case you ignore it, the update I’m talking about introduced check points.

None of my original designs were conceived to feature Check Points, although they aren’t difficult to place in any of them, given that I have a very zone oriented kind of design, with places with breathing time for the players. Among the levels that got erased, two seemed like a perfect fit for this upgrade: my ice level, Ice Cream Valley and my Mario Bros based level, Arcadia Sewers. Now, this levels aren’t intended to be all that difficult, but they have some hot zones that are quite demanding in short bursts, so they are frustrating if you have to redo them several times. Players can be sloppy and die to silly deaths when distracted (I know I do) and such difficult areas end up being an unintended punishment for them.

I settled for uploading my Ice Level first, since it had an obvious placement for the checkpoint flag, so obvious in fact that it immediately came to mind even when my memories of the level were fuzzy.

Then I decided to apply the Check Point logic to my long puzzle stage, Smile Cave /Entrance. I actually sustain that this level is quite forgiving since if you know what you’re doing is nearly impossible to die, but because of the complex interactions involved in each screen, the areas feel much longer than they are, and a Check Point feels like a relief. To me it was crystal clear which zone was the best fit to the flag, it came just after the most timed puzzle where you shouldn’t try to go back at all, at the risk of losing a live and starting from the beginning. If someone ever went back by mistake, at least then they could appear in the checkpoint and quickly correct such mistake!

To err is human

When browsing through different player-made levels in Mario Maker I tend to stumble often over the same common mistakes, some of which are arguably, intended to function as they do. I’m not going to point any fingers to any particular designer, after all, I’m fallible and my levels can be a bit too much at times. But if you are making levels, these are some problems that in my opinion, you should avoid at all costs.

Random Instant Deaths: By this I don’t mean hazardous areas with hard to avoid obstacles nor pin point difficult jumps, I actually mean deaths that are entirely based on random ocurrences that the player cannot probably foresee unless they played the level before. Unpredictability has it’s place in Platform level design and I’m more than willing to throw in some invisible hazards here and there, but to have them being punished by certain death is a disappointment and gives more frustration than it’s worth. If you are using hidden blocks as a major part of your level, go your way to show your player that they’ll be heavily featured before throwing him on a life on death situations. Tutoring by the example is key to good level design. Stuff that’s impossible to avoid is just cheap.

Leaps of Faith: These can be piled with my previous objection, but even when they aren’t immediately deadly, it’s a bad choice to feature jumps towards the unknown. Simply put, players like to participate on the experience of each level and the less information they have, the less engaging their interaction with it. If you really must have a huge distance to cover through jumping, be sure to lead the player with a trail of coins or some visual cue that they can use as reference. You don’t have to make your every trail of coins the “optimal path” to follow in your level, just make it safe enough so the players don’t feel you’re tricking them into danger. It’s fair to signal a landing spot knowing the better one is nearby, that way, the player who has to play over the same zone several times is rewarded for having seen the path already and has the ability to opt for a better landing spot.

Enemy Spams: Beating hordes of enemies looks cool, but ultimately, the more enemies you put into screen, the less the player will interact with each of them. Mario doesn’t have an Hp bar, so players will always choose to pass through your sheer numbers instead of facing them or dodge them one on one. Being overwhelmed means you have less options and you feel forced to move in a certain way or adopt a single strategy: this means less involvement from the player and less instinctive interactions, it cheapens the very experience of getting through a level. Precision is a tool that must be used with caution, and among the things that limit how you must move, hordes of enemies are harder to look at, which ends up feeling unelegant and somewhat clumsy (also it makes it harder to the designer to predict how his hazards will move exactly, effectively adding randomness to the equation, which might end up provoking unwinable situations). I don’t think putting many enemies with the lone purpose of killing them all with a Starman is great fun either, but I can accept it in small dosis provided it doesn’t replace nor numbs the gameplay.

Stairway

New level!  (I erased my level Mountain Barrier to make room for this one)

After my work on Smile Cave /Entrance I needed to make a much simpler level in terms of structure and goals. This one came after thinking a bit about the limitations on vertical scrolling proposed by Mario Maker.

Stratostairs – Descent

Level ID: D9EE-0000-00B6-43B4

This stage consists on several screens that you must navigate downstairs, each one has a different set of enemies and obstacles blocking your path. Focus on keeping your firepower to clean the pipe at the end of each zone and keep going down.

Stairs are a very common obstacle in Mario games so navigating one actually changes how you play the level on it’s own. My idea was to make a level exclusively consisting of stairs and the variation here is that you are always going downstairs. This level is a good example of how vertical visibility adds difficulty to a level, since you cannot seamlessly pass through stairs as you do when you run in a flat surface. Things appear outside your line of sight and you must be extra careful. The first difficulty to me was to limit the need for “leaps of faith” and to be reasonable with the punishment that such a jump could inflict to the player.

You will notice the entire lack of death pits in your path (I could’ve broken the stairs at some points so the player could slip to his doom), but also that the hazards are set so you must dodge most obstacles. I’ve done some “combat” levels before, but the idea of evading hazards seemed a more intuitive fit with the limitations of movement imposed by the stairs.

As far as I can tell, this level is still one of my tamest levels so I’m eager to see it perform online and see if the quirkiness of the setting gets it some attention.

Retry

I made a minor update to my course Smile Cave /Entrance and changed the access code I published here for the new one. So yes, let’s discuss about how that happened.

Originally I wanted to make the Entrance level a very safe level. My concept was that figuring out a puzzle and how to advance from one zone to the other was it’s own kind of difficulty, making a very wrong turn could cost you a live, but as long as you were attentive, no hazard would punish you with death. However, in the first iteration of this level I allowed myself two exceptions with the first and the second zone.

The first zone was the most dangerous one in the proper sense, because a hammer bro was blocking your passage and, while it was easy to avoid, it could always catch you unaware if you had to redo the zone before moving forward. The second zone wasn’t so much dangerous but it was unforgiving: a wrong placement for a P-switch made advancing impossible, having you to restart the level all over and face the first zone and it’s (tame) dangers once again. I allowed myself these two transgressions in my first upload, but predictably, most of the players who tried my levels couldn’t really get through these zones which made me sad.

I came back to the game after about a week of doing other gaming stuff (like advancing on Pikmin 3), and I had a renewed mindset towards my previous difficulties. I simply replaced the hammer bro for a much easier hazard and then retooled the second zone so it was much more forgiving. The fix for zone two was deceptively simply! I hadn’t questioned throughly the placement of my every line of blocks I placed, hoping to keep the zone open for the player, but only in appearance. The current setting is less ambiguous but it makes it up for allowing you to retry the zone in case you make a false throw.

Will it be more accepted and liked that the original? At least from my point of view the improvement is massive, which is a start.

The lesson here is: allow yourself to get an outside view in your own work, with a fresh take you are capable of finding new solutions to old problems.

Cave offensive

New level!

[b]Smile Cave /Entrance[/b]

Level ID: 3CD1-0000-00D9-4774 (Fixed version – Now with checkpoints)

In order to progress each room will challenge you with a different puzzle you need to solve. Combining underwater and land physics with item manipulation and mandatory power ups, you need to plan ahead each one of your steps and learn the layout of each zone in order to succeed.

Smile Cave /Entrance is both my first deviation from a straight up Mario levels and my first level with underwater zones. This goes to reference the kind of gameplay that I was aiming to emulate with my puzzles: that of Kirby’s Great Cave Offensive, whose floaty physics make for a very different timing than your average Mario-on-land physics.

This is one of the maps that have changed the most from its original conception. The very first puzzle was a vertical one that intended to emulate the entrance of my secret zone in Ice Cream Valley, which remains one of my favorite simple hazards. But I had to change it several times as the maximum height of the level imposed by Mario Maker limited my original concept. At that point I had not figured out the nifty combinations between Thwomps and certain items that were later featured in the level, it could’ve been a solution to my original concept which was a rat race scenario of sorts.

With the second puzzle I had a very particular difficulty: the P-switches are easily respawnable but blocks and coins affected by those switches aren’t. So this set me against producing infinite P-switches, which made missing the solution of my second puzzle an insta-death of sorts. I tried a few things to correct this impasse, but each one was clumsy or could be used as a cheat for the puzzle as a whole, so I gritted my teeth and allowed this part of the map to be punishing.

My original idea was to make a map in which it was difficult to die, in order to set it appart from my more classic maps, but also to give the player time to solve each puzzle without suffering too much. In practice, the first three zones or so can be quite deadly, but late parts of the stages are easy to survive as long as you’re stuborn and you know what you’re doing.

Because I find it annoying to dodge power ups (because you can’t really defend against their touch), in the zones where they are an obstacle, you get pretty much infinite tries against them. Under those conditions I was obliged to spawn and respawn those power ups, since just like the coins and block, they don’t autoreset by entering the area. This is sad because it limited my use of rails, which are a neat way of building power up obstacles.

More to come on this map.

Oddities

I’ve talked before about the subtle rule changes that keep us from rebuilding a level from the original Mario Games into Mario Maker, while some mechanics cannot be represented properly, others can be made fit by using a different hazard that is functionally similar to the one featured in early games. In other words, to make something work sometimes you need to sacrifice looks and fit something really clumsy into your level. My understanding is that is not always justified.

In Arcadia Sewers I made a rail based door system to keep the enemy spawning pipes from swamping my level too fast. This rails were mostly tucked into a side of the level, and while you could climb them to ease a jump or two (if you felt the need to), they were pretty neutral to the gameplay. Sure, if you were unaware or pressed, you could be crushed by one of these doors, but they aren’t really in the main path, so such occurrences were unlikely. I mostly questioned those hazards because of how they looked: there was a moving object away from the player which was distracting, not particularly attractive and did look half-finished enough to reflect badly on me. But the function it served to have them in place was very relevant to me, so I left it alone, and now I’m sort of used to them.

Sometimes small modifications aren’t entirely harmless to the gameplay, you’ll find that by entering in a warp pipe or crossing through a door some of the elements in your level reapear in their original state. But one-shot boosts, hidden blocks, coins and regular blocks remain destroyed/gone after you use them or break them. So if you want to keep your level from being too punishing, you can resort to a door, it will allow the player to fetch again that falling P-switch that he needed to get through the brick wall you built. But maybe this malicious player will go back to the door and pick the P-switch again, but the blocks that were previously blocking his path are gone… As a level designer, you need to consider those possibilities So it’s up to you, will you use the door to keep the level from being too frustrating or will you sacrifice a life or two in order to keep further rooms of your stage from being affected by the P-switch?

With enough thinkering and work you can build a level that works exactly as you want, but sometimes the difference isn’t drastic enough for you to go your way and add oddly looking obstacles. As I mentioned when we talked about Lakitu levels, there is a point in which you have to stop being in love with your difficulty and allow the player to ride a cloud instead of making ugly levels and clumsy traps. In the same way, don’t be obsessed with being generous with your player, there can be a minimum sense of danger in every level you do. Levels can look odd because they are too safe!

Revisit

The upgraded version of my second level Block Tunnels got it’s first Star, to celebrate I thought it’d be cool to talk a bit about the difference between this level and it’s predecessor.

Block Tunnels V2

Level ID: 5432-0000-0068-6268

Trying to stick to the level structure of the original Block Tunnels I engaged into shifts that were meant to reduce it’s difficulty, which included, as weird as it sounds, making the level longer.

Two things needed to be fixed right away: more powerups should be available and they needed to be better, they needed to matter. I replaced a Mushroom by a Fire Flower and added a hidden and more risky Fire Flower later in the game. The jumps were too punishing since the level featured very small platforms and springs, I added spikes over most of the pits so the player had a second chance after a mistake and felt as if the power ups he obtained mattered.

I added several secrets to the stage including an Expert Path, in which I retooled the abundance of pits and applied my recently obtained knowledge on vertical hazards.

I also featured a P-switch that could help you get through critical parts of the stage with different utility depending on when you decided to press it. This is something I also tried in my level Winged Pirates.

The addition to the last part of the stage was meant to allow you to employ your power ups and to give a more “tunnely” feeling to the whole setting, that was really more about jumps than enclosed spaces in it’s first release.

In retrospective, I think my modifications changed this stage a lot more than the ones I used in High Road & Low Path, it’s still obviously the same level in both cases, but this one feels more of a rebirth than the precedent one.

Classic feeling

New level!

This one is inspired by the original Mario Bros series, an admittedly less succesful take on the platformer than Donkey Kong, but still pretty cool:

Arcadia Sewers. Level Code: D98E-0000-0093-3F95

You fight incoming enemies in an enclosed space, making your way up in a tower like progression. This stage is focused in verticality and in timely use of the block bump (punching an enemy from below by hitting the block in which he is posed), although this is mainly the focus of a couple of stretches as I tried to mix it up with some of the tricky stuff that we met in the classic Mario Bros games. A secret zone is added in this stage for extra challenge.

When conceiving this level I needed to keep the player from progressing too fast, because the original Mario Bros game was not a scrolling game, so “advancing” was secondary to its system. But stopping the forward momentum of a player entirely is really not recommended, so I settled for hazards that would slow down progression and platforming that forces you to plan your movements ahead.

From the get to go my idea was to go with pipes that spawned enemies like in the classic game, but I found that given the maze-like form of the ascension, the mob would be spawned very quickly and overwhelm you with numbers (the vertical space for dodging was intentionally small). I settled with a clumsy looking but effective raid based “door” system, which causes the pipes to be blocked for a few of its spawn cycles, effectively sliming down it’s enemy production.

A second very real concern of mine when making this level was the power ups. In one hand, power ups are at their strongest when featured in an enemy based level, in the other, the “block bump” move is only available to regular Mario: even Super Mario crushes the blocks he hits, breaking the mechanics that I intended to retool from the original game. After reflecting in this issue I settled on using the Goomba Boot as the sole boost featured in the regular run of the game, as it can block bump regular blocks (allowing me to keep the classic look on the stage and not lean on anything too exotic), it gives you extra health and is an enemy based power up. At the end of the day, the boots I introduced make the run easier by quite a bit, but I still think the level is far from a cake walk and you cannot stack several boots at a single time.

Hopefully you’ll like this level! I’m still lagging terribly behind when it comes to stars, so I had to erase my third level Hoverfield to make room for this one.

Thoughts on lakitu and wall jumps

One of the most interesting ideas when it comes to designing level in Mario Maker is to choose between the four different rule sets that are available to the player. Making the best use of these is, in my opinion, one of the most challenging things about extensively working on Mario Maker.

No matter who you are or when you started playing Mario games, one of these styles will feel the most natural to you. I believe every designer should start by building on the settings that are more familiar to them, since your experience will have you reacting properly to different hazards depending on how you’ve played before. After a while you’ll notice that your preferred ruleset, while similar to the one you’ve used, has been changed subtly in different ways. The hazards in your palette might look familiar, but they often have particular interactions that you’ve never seen before.

One example is that killing lakitu leaves it’s cloud behind and that by taking it you can breeze to most standard obstacles with ease. It’s a serious matter whether you allow your player to have that option or if you will build countermeasures against a potential cloud traveler. I find most aerial traps to be relatively clumsy, so if you must have your player quit the cloud, a warp pipe is a more elegant option than most. Killing Lakitu is specially easy with the Super Mario World rule set, since you can throw shells and bombs vertically.

The SMW vertical throw also allows you to pin point the place in which you throw P-switchs and springs without too much risk of throwing them off a ledge.

Wall jumping allows the NSMB ruleset to deal better with vertical hazards, but your mobility is very clumsy so asking for very precise movements will lead to frustration. The line of sight is always an issue when you deal with jumping off or sliding off a down passage, so be sure to give players the ability to survive when they simply cannot know what’s down there. Punishing a player because he’s carefully sliding off a wall seems counterintuitive, if you want your player to run through a zone, encourage him to go fast, don’t punish him for playing it safe!

Wall jumping is also a legitimate way to easily deal with Lakitu!

I’m constantly discovering new interactions and new ideas that I want to adapt into my levels. Some of these mean that you cannot just copy a classic level and expect it to work exactly like it did in the original games, but in a way, that encourages us to design things that play similar to those experiences without being truly the same.