This is probably the best level I've made, or at least the one I'm most pleased with, as it's completely different from basically all the other levels I've played on Super Mario Maker. Which is nice. And also I like the way it looks.
There's four short block-based puzzles, none of which are especially difficult, but which all make use of the various properties of the different block types in slightly different ways.
There are unfortunately a couple of bugs in it (despite me playtesting it for a day and a half). In the second puzzle, if you activate the P-block but then go back through the door which you initially came through, the level becomes impossible to finish. I did edit it once I realised that but because it's impossible to edit levels you've uploaded without deleting them I've just left the bugged one up.
You can also get trapped in the blocks in the final puzzle and also just before the finish line if you try really hard, although those ones you have to be going out of your way to break the level really to end up doing that.
What I like about this course, something that I think is common of a lot of great levels in many games, is the naturalness of it. The sense that it exists as something apart of a game that has rules, and objectives, and a necessity of being completeable.
ReplyDeleteThe artificiality of games wears down on my sometimes, the sense of being created for a purpose. You can create an interesting task for the player to finish, sure. If you're blatant enough about it the player can look at it, think /game puzzle/, and even immediately set about doing what it requires. In a level like this, the very existence of an element is proof of its necessity in solving the puzzle. Like how you can figure out the crook in an episode of Scooby-Doo by finding the extraneous character, the one who has no other purpose in the story other than to show up at least once so it can be "fair" when the gang unmasks him at the end.
What a better level may have, what this one certainly does, is an /obfuscating pattern/, some aspect of the course that has a life apart from being a mechanical puzzle to be solved, both to add verisimilitude to the level, and to mask the presence of necessary puzzle elements so the player doesn't see them and think something like /ho, so I'll need a Koopa shell this time/.
(Of course when I say "naturalness," I mean in the sense of "a natural sequence of diagonally-placed blocks." Hey, it's how my brain works.)
ReplyDeleteExcellent, cheers.
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