graddy

Super Mario Maker

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Interesting analysis from Ars that confirms that the top levels list is basically static at this point, and what's there is heavily tilted away from "real" Mario levels and toward autoplay levels and Amiibo gimmicks. I hope Nintendo does some work on this.

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I've uploaded two levels so far!

 

Aquatic Caves: 6420-0000-0076-C452

This level is short and easy, and doesn't really do anything interesting.

 

Bowser's Puzzling Airfleet: 1E16-0000-0094-8C5B

Most of my effort went into this level. I wanted to make an airship level where you have to solve puzzle rooms in order to progress. No one's completed it yet, though, so I'm guessing it's too hard and too long! I need to reign it in a bit in future.

 

I'll play through some of the levels on here tonight!

 

EDIT: I re-uploaded the second level, to fix an issue where entering a secret area could prevent you from completing the level. Also made it a little less unfair.

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I have been playing this a whole bunch. The tools are easy to use and the fundamentals are all there, i'm really quite in love with it. I do think Nintendo's missing a few crucial things though. (I'd like to see doors and keys, options for enemy facing, slopes, maybe that little wall-run brick from SMW, etc.)

 

I also think it's weird that, you as the creator, only get to see a death heatmap for the main area of an uploaded map and not the sub area. It's a really useful piece of information for refining your maps, and Nintendo's kind of needlessly limited it.

 

Anyways, this is the level of mine that has received the most stars: "1ACC-0000-004A-2CB3" From there, you should be able to click through into my Mario Maker profile from your play history, i think i have some other levels uploaded that are actually much better.


I'd appreciate if people would go through what i've uploaded and star whatever they think deserves it, and i will in turn probably go through some of the levels you have all posted as well. (It saddens me that some of my favorite levels have almost no stars! They're tough, sure, but i thought they were pretty fair.) I'm also working on another few levels to upload at some point in the next few days.

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I also think it's weird that, you as the creator, only get to see a death heatmap for the main area of an uploaded map and not the sub area. It's a really useful piece of information for refining your maps, and Nintendo's kind of needlessly limited it.

 

I also want this information, but making it more available would draw more attention to a different problem: you can't patch levels.

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Hello! I made a few levels I think are worth playing!
 
Koopa's Dizzy Daze 2.0 (FD3C-0000-0048-7D65)
 
New Super Mario Brothers stage where you need to keep pace with a spinning koopa shell the whole way.
 
The Secret Boo Fortune (23BB-0000-0063-8425)
 
A tricky boo house that requires you to solve a puzzle to clear it.
 
Koopa Logic 2.0 (42A0-0000-0059-3FEE)
 
This one is a little odd. It's not a traditional level, it's a 2-bit adder made using Mario Maker. What that means is that it can add any two numbers between 0-3 and it will produce the resulting sum in goombas. It's a little tricky to work, since it uses spinning koopa shells as bits and they will simply disappear when out of view. So there's a series of p-switches you have to hit in order that gate the shells.
 
Instructions:
 
You select the numbers in binary by hitting question mark blocks. There are four blocks you can hit, two for each number in pairs. Hit the blocks to select the numbers you want to add, and THEN hit the first p-switch, waiting there for the timer to run out. Move forward until you see the next p-switch and repeat. You need to wait for the timer to run out near each p-switch you hit. When you hit the last p-switch you should see goombas appear out of question mark blocks. The number of goombas is the answer.
 

Hope you like my levels! Here's some art I did for the boo house:

 

boofortune.png

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Finally got this last week. Nothing to add to the praise chorus really. There are various little things to look forward to in updates or DLC (Super Mario Land skin maybe?) and I'd like to be able to link pipes in the same area. Also think Nintendo are missing a trick by not having an accompanying 3DS app - not the full thing, but it'd be great if they released Mario Player which allowed you to PLAY downloaded levels on the go.

I've made 4 levels thus far. I tried a 1-1 and quickly realized it was more 2-1y. Same for 2-2 and 2-4 type levels. I'm pretty happy with them. I tried to provide a variety of things to do while keeping it simple.

Two-Oney (E2F0-0000-0096-12B1)

Two-Tooie (FFA5-0000-0096-1514)

Two-FOREy (28BE-0000-0096-163D)

Finally I tried a concept level where Mario must race across the city to the hospital at rush hour. Spent hours on it putting bits and pieces in and trying to simulate a cityscape. Had fun but have lost all objectivity. I think it'll be tough, but it's supposed to be.

EMERGENCY! Paging Dr Mario! - A Rush Hour City Dash (E97E-0000-0096-21D4)

Desperate to make one of those art covers for it when I've got time! Now to sample some thumby levels.

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Alright, i'm going to go and take some time to do this right:

CDE9-0000-002C-E117 : Gosh Darn Bullet Heck!

 

The first thing i did was try to make a scrolling shoot em` up stage and i think it turned out relatively well, i think it's pretty fun. It's a little tricky, hanging back at the far left side of the screen won't work out for you, but it has a surprisingly high completion rate, so i assume i didn't make it too messed up.

 

505A-0000-0040-0202 : Airship Invasion!

 

It's big and complicated and has the lowest completition rate of any of my levels, which is a tiny bit frustrating to me, because i still think this is probably one of my best levels. It's the one i have the most fun playing through, at least.

 

9448-0000-0048-F793 : Use that cape!

 

I just wanted to have some data on how many people know how to use the cape. If i am to extrapolate from the small sample size of this level, it's about half of the people playing.

 

1ACC-0000-004A-2CB3 : Spooky Mine!

 

So here i reeled way back on difficulty after seeing how few people were finishing Airship Invasion, and i also tried to tell a bit of an implied story with the changing geography of the level. I also started playing around with the sound effects in different ways. This seems to be my most popular level at present.

 

8C83-0000-0055-7F2A: Bridge to a lost land!

 

You'll notice a theme with my levels: i enjoy messing around with thwomps and bob-ombs and koopa wizards, putting them all near breakable bits of terrain. This level is more of that, and a bit of experimentation with the particularly spooky atmosphere of the SMB1 castle set. It's a very simple level, but i think it kind of works.

 

EB5B-0000-005E-691C: Bowser Jr Brawl!

 

I liked the boss fight i concocted for Airship Invasion so much that i stripped it out, made it its own level, and expanded on it. It's ended up being one of my best received levels. I made the arena too wide though, things can despawn and slight weirdness can ensue. Make sure you grab the airship when you defeat Bowser Jr, don't let it go offscreen and despawn, you need it to make your way towards the level exit.

 

E9E9-0000-0066-FF0D: A completely normal day!

 

I'm not going to say anything about this one, just go play it.

 

0193-0000-0072-52D1: Mario's Spelunking Adventure!

 

I probably spent too much time making this one, every single tile and visual detail is purposefully placed. Lots of little decorations and layered platforms. I sort of wanted to see how far i could push the game in making a visually interesting level. I think it turned out quite nicely, and i think it's fun to play too, if very straightforward.

 

^ If anybody's curious about how i'm purposefully placing the decorations that randomly spring up from ground tiles: When i start out with a level, i sort of scribble around a lot, move any ground pieces that have the decorations into a little palette, and then copy the tiles from that palette as i make the level.

 

There's a lot of fun tricks you can do with sound effects too, depending on what effect is affixed to which object.

 

I also played through a bunch of the levels you guys uploaded and gave out quite a few stars too, if anybody wants any specific feedback, go ahead and ask.

 

Anyways, I have another level that i'll probably uploaded in a day or two. It's got a lot of fun little tricks going on, but it's probably going to be miserably difficult. I was getting tired of making very easy levels.

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New level!

 

90B0-0000-0097-ABA4: A dangerous town!

 

This one is probably the most difficult level i've made, though in the end i reeled back on the difficulty a bunch while playtesting it and i feel the result is pretty fair. I quite like how certain parts of it turned out though, I think it has a lot of fun sequences that i might split out into their own levels once i've earned enough stars to unlock more upload slots. (I believe i only need a few more? FEED ME STARS.)

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So, goddamn it, I just dropped $500 to buy a Wii U, this, and a couple other things. I have to experience this game and won't be held by any longer.

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Peach's Revenge: B9E9-0000-009A-8949
Take revenge on Bowser for repeatedly using you as a lazy plot device! A fairly straightforward castle level that I thought was pretty easy. So far two people have played it, neither of them completing it, with 30 deaths between them, though! I don't know what to say.

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New level!

 

C584-0000-00A3-02F9: Rumble in the Sky!

 

Expanding on what i was trying to do with the boss fight in my last upload, but as a more moderately difficult thing in a short and focused level. The way it turned out, i'm pretty pleased with it. (Also, i can't really take full credit, i definitely stole the core idea from another level that's probably still somewhere in my starred levels history.)

 

Also, Synnah gave me a bunch of stars that pushed me into the next rank! Now i have twenty upload slots. Woo!

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I made a level. I guess. It's with very limited tools so I dunno. I may modify it in the future.

Edit - Doesn't exist anymore! See next post.

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I did a remake of my level. The clear rate was SUPER LOW for what I felt was a mid-difficulty level. The new code is here:

EE5A-0000-00AA-F1DA

 

Edit - I finished my two-route level sooner than I expected. Here it is:

CEB4-0000-00AB-F994

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Excited to try some of these levels! 

 

Here's my first attempt at a level after unlocking all of the things.

 

 
 
852D-0000-00AF-F998

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@TangoCharlie: Really enjoyed THE ICE-WRECK OF THE HMS KOOPA (7EDF-0000-0078-0D79). Your other levels were quite good too, but this one was a whole new level of awesome. Looking forward to more levels.


 


@Henroid: I liked both routes in your two-route level (CEB4-0000-00AB-F994). One of the few levels I went back to play again after beating. 

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I got a Wii U this weekend. I'll be sure to go back through this thread and try all the courses, but in the meantime here's my first effort:

5A21-0000-00B5-2E71

I was trying not to be too gimmicky, though there is an attempt at a theme. It's also not supposed to be outrageously challenging or anything. Hopefully someone gets at least one moment of enjoyment from it.

 

Since my first Nintendo console was the N64, I'm not intimately familiar with classic Mario. I die an awful lot.

 

Watching Patrick Klepek tackle the GB community levels was a delightful stroll down schadenfreude lane.

My momentous contribution to the second one was saying "make a bit where you have to go left".

EDIT: It turns out I accidentally made the course way harder than I'd intended (it had one completion out of 112 tries). I'd tested the main route, then used a shortcut to actually finish it when uploading. It turns out that some question mark blocks I'd added right at the end made what should have been a simple jump very tricky indeed. Anyway, I fixed that and made a few other tweaks, re-uploaded and updated the code above to reflect the changes. I still think the bang-your-head-on-the-ceiling platforming section in the middle is probably more annoying than fun, but I didn't have any immediate great ideas to replace it with.

So I suppose my first Mario Maker lesson is to test a lot, and to take the main path when uploading stages.

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Is it a good time to jump into Mario maker yet? I am waiting until the community has settled down and there's less auto play levels and more good stuff.

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I'd say get stuck in now. Even without the community stuff, you can follow individuals and sample specific things pretty easily. The codes are cumbersome but you only need one and then you can access everything that person's made.

Also it's great making your own stages, and not just super intricate concept stuff. I'm essentially (and slowly) making my own Mario game starting from 1-1 and trying to make fun 'normal' levels with the kind of variety and pacing of a real Mario game.

I wouldn't wait :)

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I'm not sure the built-in level discovery mechanisms are ever going to be good, barring a total overhaul. The top lists are pretty calcified and full of autoplay levels, and the 100 Mario Challenge is entirely based around difficulty and not fun.

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Is it a good time to jump into Mario maker yet? I am waiting until the community has settled down and there's less auto play levels and more good stuff.

Get in now. When you go to "course world," the thing that let's you play other peoples' levels, the first list that pops up is a randomized sorting of newly created levels. It's only when you go to the list based on stars awarded where you'll get the dumb automated stuff. Well, except for the music levels; technically auto-play levels, but with an actual interesting purpose.

 

Turns out I'm friends with the top-rated guy in Mario Maker. I've known him for the better part of ten+ years.

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Is it a good time to jump into Mario maker yet? I am waiting until the community has settled down and there's less auto play levels and more good stuff.

 

If you're not burning to play it, I'd wait. Will anyone still be talking about MM in six months? My guess is that it will be as hard to find good levels then as it is now. If you've got a Nintendo platforming itch, I think Yoshi's Wooly World would provide better value.

 

My experiences with the 100 mario challenge is that the levels are either difficult in a way that is not interesting/fun or they are easy to the point of being boring. I usually find 1 out of the 18 levels in a 100 mario challenge to be worthwhile. I usually skip at least a dozen (i'm guessing).

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