So I think I actually might intentionally withhold giving the player a mushroom because
that opens up some interesting opportunities to make dangerous traps that they can't take a hit and move past.
Hi, my name is James Montagna, and I am a designer at WayForward.
I've worked on the Shantae series and Mighty series games, and this is my Mario Maker level.
I kind of went into this blind, but in the back of my mind I wanted to create something that would sort of
encapsulate the ideas of WayForward in general and some of our design philosophies.
WayForward a really strong Mario Maker culture of creating and sharing levels, and I wanted
to also kind of honor some of the ideas that I've come across in the levels that the Mario
Maker players at WayForward have created. And they even hold mini, like, contests around
the company, and so after work, we'll go in the back of the office and play everyone's
Mario Maker levels, and we'll have like a ballot – it's a lot of fun!
There is a level by one of the programmers at WayForward, Wally, he did a really, really
clever level where you're using items as kind of lock-and-key puzzle pieces.
I wanted to take that idea and sort of turn it on its head and use live enemies as puzzle
pieces, so what we went ahead and did was make individual rooms, and each room requires
a different enemy that you have to bring in with you in order to clear that room and get
a pink coin, which acts as sort of like a key to progress to the end of the course.
I guess it's time to make some puzzles that uses these dudes, so I guess I'll start with the
Goomba. We had to sort of dissect each enemy and break
it down into: "What are the components that make it up?
What are its behaviors?" And part of that comes from just growing up
playing these games. For this one, I think understanding the enemies
before you use them and observing their behavior will go a long way to solving the puzzles.