Don’t let anyone tell you: Level design is difficult. Ensuring that the game feels fun and refreshing for a player, as the difficulty arises, skill designers spend their lives crafting, even for seemingly simple games. But with the advent of Super Mario Maker 2, some of their tools are at your disposal.
Some people have not seen or at least seen Mario’s level at work. Jump on goombas, throw coins out of coins, jog from side to side: simple input, but the game lasted for decades.
When the first Mario Maker game was launched in 2015, it provided a way to begin creating your own Mario levels, bringing your character to a classic franchise – or appreciating the company’s style.
Super Mario Maker 2 brought the level editor to the Nintendo Switch, speeding it up on one screen (compared to the dual-screen setup of the first game on the Wii U and 3DS) and gives you plenty of tools to play from the start. . But what do you do with them?
To get an idea of where and how to actually begin sharing levels with the online Super Mario Maker 2 community, we wrote Chris Totten (@Toter87), an award-winning game designer and author of The Architectural Approach to Level Turned. Design.
Totten has an entire Twitter thread on basic blocks of tier design (just click on a tweet above to see everything), but if you’re looking for the next level of insight, you can read our interview below Can. Given our first few attempts to level up, we feel we will need all the help we can get…
TR: How do the tools in Super Mario Maker compare to the tools used by developers?
Whistle: “When I first got Mario’s maker I immediately thought,” Holy cow, it’s like work! ”
Mario Maker’s equipment is a beautiful comeback in the gaming industry. You don’t have the full flexibility of the engine (I can’t change the behavior of the Koppa Troopa or the Mario crossover) but that’s enough to get you thinking about the game’s design. It’s like an old Doom or Quake edit, as you’re building your content on a preset system, and that’s what many professionals started.
The next stage is a system similar to Little Big Planet that allows you to search across systems of things and then more specific game engines such as Game Maker, Unity, Construct, and more. ”
TR: What is the most important thing when designing a level design?
CT: The most important thing is the player’s experience. What experience are you trying to create for someone? Remember that you can’t be next to someone who plays your level or game, telling them what to do – so you have to offer something that gives you the feel you want when you’re next to it. Do not occur physically.
TR: What are the general predictions of early designers?
CT: Some are. The first is that people feel this is difficulty = quality, so they intentionally give things to players to travel (invisible blocks that block progress, take away enemies from the screen, etc.). Don’t do this: It will make people not just want to play their games.
The second is that new designers (and even giants) are designing for their own skills rather than choosing the game for the first time. There is this scene in Tron where Jeff Bridges wins all the games at the arcade because he was secretly the one who made it – that’s you! You are very good at your own game, so you need to test it on people who have never played before to find the right difficulty.
Third, designers do not play enough tests and keep their work a secret. Showing things to players in progress helps you improve them before releasing them.
Even if you leave him and he is evil, you can still release and learn. Many of us who have made the game have released bad or unpopular games, but the release experience was still meaningful and educational. Do not give up – keep creating!
Chris Totten is a senior designer, illustrator and project manager at Indie Pie for Breakfast Developer.
Check out his tweets on Amazon at @ Totter87 or his book, Architectural Approaches to Level Design.
At heart, Super Mario Maker 2 has a simple hypothesis: allow players to design their own Mario levels.
But even this personal goal provides an endless amount of fun and creativity with the happy and giddy Nintendo editor.
After the original Super Mario Maker game on the Wii U, and its final 3DS port, this sequence / reboot on the Nintendo Switch avoids many pitfalls from previous inputs, making it more accessible and still giving you the business key. Maintains Mario Interior.
Whether these keys really do, or fly in the Choms series and Goombas, they are completely up to you.
We’ve asked you to give us a full review following the Super Mario Maker 2 build tools and all-new story modes and online features, and we can say that this creative-minded Mario entry is worth your time.
