I am a huge fan of auto-scroll levels, and I know everybody primarily hates them.
(laughs) But I try to make them slow so it's not too
ridiculous. I'm Michael Herbster,
I've worked on Shovel Knight, and this is my Mario Maker level.
I initially thought I would be working in the water tile set of any of the Mario games,
and ended up settling on Mario 3 with an airship auto-scroll level.
The challenges of water levels in general are ridiculous – in my opinion, anyways.
That's probably one of our hardest levels that we strung together in Shovel Knight,
which is Iron Whale (Treasure Knight), and that level alone I think had 8 re-dos.
And like, it was a good month or two worth of work, and it'd be:
I'd go through it, and me and Sean (Velasco) would play it, and I'd hate it, and it would
just repeat like that. It's truly a trial to put together a good
water level. After playing through this level several times
and evaluating the physics of Mario 3 vs. Mario World,
I felt the level was tighter in the Mario 3 environment.
Making sure that your levels have less going on with them can be a huge help,
making sure that you're sticking to a set of objects and enemies –
not necessarily as few as possible, but that feel right for the level.
I think for mine, I'm only using the wrench-tossing enemy,
along with Koopa Troopas – red shell particulars –
and then the objects that I chose were the fire pillars from Mario 3 along with the cannons
from 3. By limiting myself in those choices, it allows
me to focus on making sure that the experience can be ramped accordingly.
Another thing that concerns me is: in Mario 1, you couldn't go backwards.
So the fact that you can do that in this game instantly throws me off every time I start
playing it, because I'm like "Oh, okay, this is Mario,"
and then I start to try to run left just to get away from something,
and when the whole screen scrolls instead of me going up to an imaginary left wall that
always follows me, it throws me off really bad.
This level mitigates that concern for me because you're forced to always go right, so left
is never an option. I would say that it's limiting, because I'm
forcing that onto the player, but at the same time, that's the vibe that I'm going for.
In order to make you feel pressure, that is just going to be the screen's scroll rate.
I feel like that middle section that I just pulled off might be a little too hard, so
I'm going to push it all the way to the back, to allow the player to get breathing room
and, much like how we introduced these guys here,
I want to do an introduction to the actual cannonball, vs, like, "hey, here's 15 cannons
shooting off." That way, it's at least ramped, so that the
player isn't, like, just thrown this completely ridiculous thing before we get to the next
thing. You know what, we can leave that there.
Coins can help as a breadcrumb trail for the player to follow,
and it keeps their eyes focused on hopefully what's coming up.
Since we did an auto-scroll, the coins might not necessarily be needed,
but there's still a factor of fun in collecting them.
Making sure to stick with simplicity can help quite a bit.
There's always a time and a place to have fun with all the objects that you can, but
also, thinking about what you're placing and how
someone may react helps quite a bit. I feel that specifically with the fire pillars
towards the end of the level, it's very climactic, and it helps promote just like that it's the
end of the level, so that you feel like you've got this big
burst of energy right at the end in order to finish the level out.