RZRiot
Style: Expert
Pro: Great platforming
Con: Enemy placement, balancing difficulty
Magnum Opus: Bowser Jr's Security System
Most at home: Balanced- leaning SMB 3
Progression notes:
You strike me as someone with a great affinity for platformers and as such you excel in that area. Unlike the others I've analyzed, you started out strong and you started to lose your way as you went on. I adored your early levels, but was not fond at all of your two latest stages. You do not want a zero percent clear rate, no matter what difficulty you're aiming for. Man, your early levels that focused on platforming were so solid! They really gave you a sense of momentum due to the top notch platforming layout and and unobtrusive enemy dispersion. I am giving you a very specific criticism:
your boo circle hazards do not work. These were a pain in the ass, and next to impossible due to cramping issues. Providing players with challenge is fantastic... but you don't want to confound them. Honestly, most of your stages were more than great --really, truly well done--but those last two soured the batch. I was beyond confused in your Mario 3 Castle/ghost house hybrid. I was backtracking half the time without even realizing it! Mario maker has new tools that allow us to block off paths. You should try them.
You're clearly way more skilled than me. Perhaps some of these shortfalls are strictly due to my own ineptitude. My advice to you is to find a good pace and balance. Maybe try playing your stages like a less skilled player for perspective? What worked for me in this regard was instead of working from the solution you started with (your idea), work TO the solution as that's what players have to do. I think it's pretty sweet that you are experimenting and pushing the envelope, but balancing difficulty going forward should be your top priority(as you predicted it would be.)
Feel free to PM me with your new stages and I'll gladly help playtest them so you can finetune them. I can't represent every player, but I can represent a player with above-average Mario experience.
Robido
Style: Random
Pros: Uh, surprising?
Cons: Complete lack of cohesion
Magnum Opus: Coinstravaganza!!!
Most at home: I'm going to say, a rave
Progression notes:
Don't take this the wrong way, but your levels were not my cup of tea. I never had a clue what was going on. I never knew where to go, what the level was trying to be, and most often... why I died. When I made progress in your levels, I was cheesing it. I felt like I'd get far by cheating, only to get killed by a really haphazardly placed obstacle. I get a very Expert 100 Mario challenge vibe from your stages, no offense, and I wasn't inclined to continue any of them after I died. I think perhaps your devil-may-care design might simply be a bad fit for my palette. If you're looking for advice, I'd say start to play some GAF stages and take a look at the sort of things they are doing. If you want to seriously improve, you have to want to make a real effort to craft stages other people will enjoy. If you're throwing out stuff with no discernible-- at least to me-- direction or purpose there will be no sense of progression or cohesion for the player to follow. Your levels lack structure or theme. The Bowser prison stage looks like it wanted to have a theme but I waited on a long, boring platform ride only to get bombarded by a clusterfuck of cannon fire out of nowhere. There was no way I was playing again after that. I really apologize I don't have anything more constructive and specific to help, but I just couldn't make heads or tails of virtually anything you threw at me. Maybe you can fill me in on what you were trying to achieve?
Thanks for such a detailed critique. I was indeed running some stages by a lot of streamers tonight, and something that jumped out at me was that a lot of mechanics that were second-nature to me through a lot of experience playing with the editor are not that obvious to people who are only armed with a lot of experience playing Mario stages. I saw some incredibly quick and acrobatic players stumped by the different interactions you can get out of blocks, springs, and switches, or unsure of which barriers are passable and which ones aren't, especially in an unfamiliar theme introduced in Super Mario Maker (e.g. SMB1 Ghost House) where the player doesn't have years of conditioning in how different kinds of platforms look.
I created a lot of alternate pathways in every course with the idea that if the player fails, they can have a chance to find an alternate route. What I didn't expect was for the norms of the player community to converge so quickly on a) stages that can be played in small, repeatable segments with a generous safety net of power-ups, and b) a preference for returning to safe, reliable, tested paths when you fail, instead of striking out in other directions. It's true that designing for streamers, 100 Mario Challenge, or level-sharing threads like this one (where people sift through a big list all at once and might not have the patience to really master the ins and outs of a single stage) just can't assume the same kind of persistence from the player as a standard Nintendo Mario stage, where clearing the flag is a roadblock in a larger progression path.
A lot of people talk about checkpoints, but this is why I really wish there were an equivalent to the NSMB three-coin system, to allow for gentler separation between novice and expert play and stages that are easy to clear but hard to master.
You shouldn't nessisarily blame the norms, because I think this kind of response is natural-- seeing as how I approached your stages just as an average Mario player would. You shouldn't really have to need tons of power ups... which is really my main point. I was saying that your levels with the way they were set up needed them. Think of it this way: it's not the individual hazards, but the sum of their parts. You were trying to accomplish too much at once. While, yes, you do provide alternate paths, people tend to want revenge on the things that kill them. They aren't liable to have fun if they are constantly forced to disregard what they learned by dying and settle for a pity route. They won't know the other route was possible and might even believe you to have trolled them. If anything, the meta seems to be too quick to assuming something is "kaizo". It's like PTSD from 100 Mario Expert. I personally tend to feel belittled by the 'you failed so go this way' type of stage design, but I know its a common practice in most platformers.
Hmm. I don't see 3-coins as a solution. They'll be just as irrelevant as 1-ups. Lives become sort of like golden coins due to the 3 life limit in 100 Mario Challenge... but that same forced rationing is really at odds with taking risks in general. No one wants to lose a life to gain a life. Golden Coins will have even less incentive to collect, being even more useless. Unless gold coins unlocked something, I'm sure players would be hard pressed to care.
I'm more than happy to keep critiquing others' bodies of work indefinitely. Just keep sending requests my way with a code and I'll give you as detailed and constructive of an opinion as I can.
