Mario Maker and the Beautiful Art of Manipulation

Strict Standards: Only variables should be assigned by reference in /home/noahjames7/public_html/modules/mod_flexi_customcode/tmpl/default.php on line 24

Strict Standards: Non-static method modFlexiCustomCode::parsePHPviaFile() should not be called statically in /home/noahjames7/public_html/modules/mod_flexi_customcode/tmpl/default.php on line 54

Strict Standards: Only variables should be assigned by reference in /home/noahjames7/public_html/components/com_grid/GridBuilder.php on line 29

NintendoSuper Mario Maker, Nintendo’s upcoming game-creation software for Wii U, doesn’t give you all of its tools immediately. Instead, it rolls them out in dribs and drabs, a day at a time. This is intended to let you cut your teeth making simpler Mario levels first, before moving on to more complex machinery.After I made my first in-game level, I unlocked the ability to make underwater levels. Everyone hates underwater levels—I didn’t see a single one on the Mario Maker online servers—so I decided I should try it. My goals were still the same: Create a Mario level that was fun but fair, something with a tight, restrained design, something that taught the player something about how the game behaves, then iterated on that, making it more and more challenging.So far, I’ve found that inspiration comes when I play around with Super Mario Maker, just dragging various elements around and playing with them, seeing how they react and how they work in combinations. The game’s effortless switching between playing and editing makes that easy to do. In the underwater level, I quickly found something I liked: One of the elements is a platform that you can swim up from underneath, but can’t go through it from the top.

NintendoIn other words, a one-way passage. I had my fun underwater experiment: A tight-squeeze passage with enemies and obstacles, which you could easily avoid by just swimming all the way to the top—but then you’d find yourself without a way to proceed. You’d have to stay in the middle the whole way through.This also afforded me the ability to make up for one of Mario Maker‘s annoying missing features: Levels can’t have checkpoints that you return to if you die. But by strategic placement of walls and holes, I could make it so that the player, if they accidentally swam up too high, wouldn’t have to go all the way back to the beginning of the level. Thus, I had my checkpoints, and I could feel free to be a little bit trickier with my obstacle placement.

NintendoOf course, having decided this, it led me to my next design challenge: It wasn’t in any way obvious that these were one-way platforms, and so I needed to force the player to mess up, but in a safe way and that didn’t cause them much of a setback. I needed to make sure they learned the conceit of the level before it was too late. Since the “trap” area at the top of the screen already looked so inviting, free of enemies and obstacles, there was a pretty good chance the player would swim all the way up into it in the first five seconds anyway. But I had to be sure. So my opening scene was carefully staged. The player started at the bottom, and saw that they had to swim up to clear some (non-harmful) coral columns. In so doing, they found a few patrolling Cheep Cheep fish and a tall Bullet Bill launcher. The big wide hole between the Cheeps was the best way to pass them, making the player swim down a little before they saw the tall cannon.Note that there were no Blooper enemies, or anything else that could travel up and down. This was because I didn’t want the trap to become a death trap, only a minor annoyance that forced the player to backtrack. (Later, it would become a minor death trap, but only once the player understood to avoid it at all costs.) So all the enemies were rigidly locked to horizontal pathways, that I could carefully manipulate.Finally, here was the first challenge: The player has to swim over the Bullet Bill cannon, high enough to clear it, but not so high as to enter the trap. One more challenge, and they’ve cleared the first “checkpoint,” and get a Super Mushroom for their troubles, which will let them take a hit but keep moving.Each progressive section got harder, with more enemies and narrowing passageways. Along the way I tried to hide extra-life mushrooms. I was particularly proud of this one, at the very end of my second checkpoint:

NintendoYou may notice that what’s about to happen is that the mushroom is going to bounce up back towards, and eventually into, the trap that the player had just successfully avoided! A skillful player can get it before that happens, and an extremely precise swimmer can actually touch the 1up with their head to collect it without going through the trap. But I thought it was a nice little risk-reward moment, built around a little Rube Goldberg machine that’s fun to watch in action.Having learned my lesson with my first level about playtesting prior to publishing, I enlisted Semi-Official Game|Life QA Department My Wife to play what I had dubbed “Cheep Tricks and Blooper Reels.”Everything went well. She swam up to the top, ran forward, found the first wall blocking her progress, and immediately understood what the trick was. She accidentally went too high at one point later, but wasn’t frustrated—if anything, it steeled her resolve to go back and do it right. That’s precisely what I was hoping for.“That was great!” I said, when she was done. “You did everything I wanted you to. You even hid in that little block I’d carved out to get past those Cheep Cheeps in the second part.”She paused. “So, what, I’m your puppet, that’s what you’re saying? Does this make you feel good?”“Well, yes,” I said, “you know, it’s good game design, like the first part of 1-1, and…”“Ugh,” she said. “All I’m seeing is The Stanley Parable now,” a game we’d both played that was about how games manipulate the player.“I just gave you your idea for your next article, didn’t I,” she said, putting the controller down.As I continued to make Mario Maker courses, unlocking more and more parts, I started to think about this some more: Super Mario Maker isn’t Photoshop. It, too, is a game, designed by the masters at Nintendo to get me to do what they want. In this case, they want me to create levels. They need me to create levels, and have fun doing so, else they have failed as game designers. And they need me to make levels so the game’s online servers can be filled with levels, thus increasing the value of their software.The puppet strings do not stop at my hands.

Mario Maker and the Beautiful Art of Manipulation

Find out more by searching for it!

Custom Search

CoalaWeb Traffic