There are, of course, new building blocks for budding designers, and Nintendo also added a very detailed series of lessons on game design, covering everything from specific mechanics to philosophies on game difficulty. One was online multiplayer play, and another was a more robust story mode that offers more than 100 pre-built levels to play from. “We knew that those types of courses were possible,” he says, “but seeing the specific shapes they took, and the lengths that people went to to make them, it really took us by surprise.”įor the sequel, there were a number of elements that didn’t make it into the first game that the team wanted to revisit on the Switch. Tezuka distinctly remembers seeing someone make a working calculator in the game, and he was always impressed by the automated levels, Rube Goldberg-style contraptions that pushed players along without any input. Users created everything from punishing death traps to inventive levels that used goombas and piranha plants to tell a story. The first Super Mario Maker launched on the Wii U in 2015, and it almost immediately spawned a dedicated audience of would-be level designers. (When asked if that internal tool still exists for making Nintendo games, Tezuka says “it’s actually a secret.”) Not only was the tool intuitive, it was also a blast to play. As soon as he saw the prototype, Tezuka - who started at Nintendo in 1984, and has worked on nearly every Super Mario game, serving as director on everything from Super Mario World on the SNES to the mobile Super Mario Run - realized that it could be something much bigger. Instead, it began as an experimental prototype within Nintendo’s tools team, who were trying to make it easier and faster for designers to put together 2D Mario levels. Photo by Bob Riha, Jr./Nintendo via Getty Imagesĭespite its current status as the Switch’s big summer release, Super Mario Maker didn’t actually start life as a commercial product. Takashi Tezuka (in red, to the left of Mario) at E3 in 2014. “I’m always thinking about that,” he says with a laugh. It’s the kind of tool that Tezuka would’ve killed for when he was designing games in the early 1980s. Players can create obstacles and then test them out in seconds, and it’s all done via the Switch’s touchscreen. Like its predecessor, it’s more of a tool than a game, an intuitive and playful way for players to craft their own 2D Super Mario levels and share them with others online.
It’s a far cry from his most recent project where Tezuka served as producer on Super Mario Maker 2 for the Nintendo Switch, which launches today.
“That cycle really took a long time,” Tezuka explains. This process would happen multiple times, as the team adjusted each stage to get them just right. Then they would bring the drawing to a programmer, who would try to translate it into the actual game. First, a designer would sketch out their vision for a level on graph paper. for the NES, creating levels was a laborious, time-consuming process. When Takashi Tezuka served as assistant director on the very first Super Mario Bros.
0 kommentar(er)
