Seeing where people have died on my courses. FML I’m out here thinking it was an obvious path. Not obvious enough it seems. 
New course:
1Frame Jump:
C816-0000-008E-4234
Feedback as always would be appreciated. Happy gaming 
Got another video up of my 100 Mario Challenge (Normal).
Things aren’t as eventful this time around unfortunately. That’ll change with the next one though…
(Added Intuitive2011’s new stage to the front page, just like I already added the last two new stages last night without saying anything.)
Geez, at least three automatic levels on that run? I wonder how “difficulty” is determined since it’s clearly picked rather randomly.
Speaking of wondering, I wonder why the static buzzing in your video got significantly worse in the “boo house of death” level but barely made a peep anywhere else. Weird.
Regardless, thanks for the video. There’s been so few in here thus far, which I still find a bit odd honestly.
Tried:
Zombiedriver’s "100 Coins! Can you find them all?"
LordWilliam’s Fire Temple
Sonichuman’s Doomship
I also rambled a bit about my laggy-ass TV I’m now kinda’ forced to play on.
(I already commented on your latest video on Youtube, @Roknin, which I usually don’t do in general, so I don’t have anything say about that particular video here beyond “thanks for sharing.”)
I will say, however, that I’ve decided to put your videos and LordWilliam1234’s two videos on the front page in the first post. Please tell me or T20thoughts if you want some or all of them taken down or something given I also embedded the four videos that you didn’t post in this thread there.
At present, it’s only both of you guys’ videos, though, since every other relevant video has already been linked to under Miscellany–now “System Miscellany”–or Non-SRK Stages and I’ve already said that I refuse to link to Game Grumps; I’m also not going to link to my own posts.
With that said, I’ll say that with regards to Fire Temple, you may want an invisible block (or something) in that gear room and to make ledges when bouncing off the cannonball one block more open if possible, @LordWilliam1234. It’s up to you though, especially since I’m just going by second-hand information of a lazy watcher who doesn’t have the game itself and the latter might not be that necessary and in fact detrimental.
Both have been fixed with a new Fire Temple:
358C-0000-0090-E9C8
Thanks for the input. Guess it’s gonna be a thing with my temples that version 0 has at least one place where you’re forced to start over. 
Kinda sad you didn’t make it to the end especially since you were getting pretty close but it’s nice that you played it. I see I that you were learning the stage as you were going through it and you were progressively getting past stuff without being really ‘stuck’ anywhere which is what I’m trying to go for with most of my stages. Actually watching someone play through the stage for the first time is great.
Hmmm…I think I’m gonna start work on Monty Mole Gang’s Mountain tonight…
What makes a good stage design?
Well, I did say things would get more eventful. Though I’m not sure “fair” would be a word I would use alongside that in some of these…
Automatic music levels, apparently.
(I’ve added the updated Fire Temple and the latest video, which came far sooner than I was expecting, to the first post.)
Geez. About half of the stages in this particular video were unfair to the point where now I’m wondering even more how the game determines the difficulty of things outside of the last stage always being a stage that uses the castle/fortress background. Similarly, about half of the stages you got this time were Japanese when you barely got any from Japan last time. Huh.
Either way, the only good ones were “Lakitu’s Colosseum”, which has potential, and “Rosalinas [sic] Space Adventure”, which was a nice SMB2 throw-back on top of a Super Mario Galaxy reference despite neither of those styles being in the game and having a few minor flaws still.
I think, like most things, it ultimately comes down to personal preference. As such, it’s probably better to talk about what makes bad or at least poor stage design since I’m sure more people would agree about that than its opposite. Off the top of my head, I can think of about half a dozen things that I would count universally as poor stage design, though in most of these cases, there’s possible exceptions with good enough planning:
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Impossible to Beat on the First Attempt - This isn’t to say that your levels have to be easy. Far from it since, if anything, I’m probably the person in here most against “hand-holding” in stages. It’s just, that if your level basically requires foreknowledge of any and all obstacles to beat the first time through, otherwise the player instantly dies upon a mistake or gets stuck without any recourse for an out, then it’s probably poorly designed. Pretty much all of the Kaizo stages and their pretenders do this, but I at least give the Kaizo stages a pass because a) they were first and b) a way of pranking a friend rather than being an asshole to random strangers because you thought it made you “cool”. It also helps that pretty much all of the Kaizo stages are actually better designed than most of their pretenders, particularly on a visual level.
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Filled With Cheap Surprise Deaths - Not necessarily the same thing as the above, since it’s very possible to beat some stages that like to put a bunch of invisible blocks near pits that you have to jump over or unseen enemies that like to crash down upon or directly in front of you through nothing but dumb luck. It’s still rather unlikely, though, and it makes you look like an asshole in most instances unless there’s at least some subtle indicator that the player could legitimately use as a context clue to not die. It rather goes without saying that, in most instances, making a pipe or door that puts you in a room that instantly kills you is also a bad idea that falls into this category.
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Supersaturation Of…Anything Save For Standard Blocks And Maybe Coins, Really - With relatively few exceptions, putting too much of anything in a stage, whether it’s an enemy or object or spikes or enemies in blocks or something else like winged enemies on a non-sky stage, tends to look cluttered and ugly, at least if it’s all in one area and especially if they’re not linearly laid out. To me, two objects are worst offenders of this: spikes, which people too often put everywhere to up fake difficulty since you can’t touch them without getting damaged or, too often, dying since you’re not guaranteed to ever get a power-up in stage, and invisible blocks, though at least they mostly don’t clutter up the stage with ugliness, especially since you’re often likely to be soon dead after hitting just one depending on where they’re placed.
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Unseen Enemies - This is often the same thing as “filled with cheap surprise death”, but not necessarily since currently there are no enemies in the game that instantly kill you. These enemies often come from off-screen, though typically it’s far more often above you than below you since way too many people like to overuse Lakitus and, to a lesser degree, Thwomps. At least with Thwomps, however, there are often context clues (or people just being predictable); Lakitus are often placed just off-screen with no indication they’re there until you get a spiny or now some other random enemy thrown in your face. Lakitus also have the issue of often just outright breaking stages if you happen to get a hold of their clouds since free-roaming flight with a rather generous time limit and controls will do that in combination with poor planning. (I’m also including enemies in blocks here, though for the most part I only think those are poorly designed if they’re in the majority of power-up blocks, almost always going to be triggered unintentionally even when you know they’re there, nigh unavoidable after being released, detrimental to release or some combination thereof.)
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Only One Intentional Way of Beating Your Non-Puzzle Stage - Unless you made a puzzle-stage where you can readily go back and correct mistakes while learning, there really shouldn’t be only one intentional way of beating your level in my opinion since then, regardless of the amount of (often fake) difficulty, every successful play-through basically ends up being the same and only more numerous failed play-throughs have the illusion of variance if people don’t all generally die in the same area. I’m not saying that every area needs to have multiple paths or can’t just generally be a straight line. Instead, I’m saying that your stage doesn’t really have any excuse of doing “you need to do x, y and z perfectly and in short order so as not to die or get permanently stuck and you can’t do anything else”, especially since puzzle levels (should) differ in that getting stymied doesn’t automatically kill you in most instances and you actually have a chance to think about how to solve things. Similarly, despite thinking this is a negative point, I also still think it’s a negative aspect to not play-test enough to realize your stage can be beaten and often trivialized in an alternate way, i.e. with the aforementioned Lakitu’s cloud, though that’s generally more understandable; regardless, that’s why “intentional” is there.
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Leaps of Faith - These are always bad in platforming games, especially with the screen-scrolling from Super Mario World apparently gone and especially since in most cases they can be avoided. At the very least, there’s no excuse for not putting arrows or some other indicator of where the ground or platform or goal you can’t see is given all the ways you can do so in this game, though even those don’t always help completely depending how small you make the landing area or far away it actually is, especially if the player is already mid-jump.
Beyond that, there’s things I just personally dislike that I personally wouldn’t put in stages if I ever get around to begin able to make any, i.e. springboards, but I think that avoiding at least the above six things is a generally good rule for avoiding bad or poor stage design (in platforming games in general).
I believe levels in the 100 Mario Challenge are chosen based on the clear rate of said level, which is the closest the game can get to determining the difficulty of the level (higher clear rate = Easy, medium clear rate = Normal, very low clear rate = Expert. You get a ton of Kaizo crap when you pick expert, which is part of the reason I haven’t done a video on it). Naturally since the skill level of the players that actually play the level can vary so much, along with the number of players that play the level, this is skewed somewhat, so it’s not perfect. Hence the somewhat sharp difference in difficulty between the levels I played in session #2 and session #3.
Not to mention that levels with few/no plays also get on the 100 Mario Challenge. The algorithm can’t really do much to help that. I AM guessing that levels won’t appear on Easy until they’ve actually proven a high clear rating, but I’ve run into a few kaizo-bullshit levels on Normal.
Cave of Fire and Ice
5173-0000-0093-A54A
My first stab at an ice level mixed with fire elements. Spent a few days on this one. We don’t have ice themed levels (yet) but since the game lets you use plenty of ice blocks, you can still have slip sliding stages.
Got another video. Mostly uneventful though…
…mostly.
I wonder if we should make a drinking game out of the number of levels I play on that fit @“The Damned”'s list of poor stage design. Or could that potentially be too dangerous?
(It seems rather appropriate that the 13th level ended up being the most difficult this time, though the 14th level being censored makes suddenly wonder just how much can get passed Nintendo even if that wasn’t the reason for you censoring it.)
As much as I’m not against suicide, I’d rather not inspire mass suicide (in this instance) given we’d all assuredly die from alcohol position over the course of just a normal 100 Man-Mario, even if it was on Easy. So, yeah, no. That would be a horrifically bad idea.
Besides, it’s not as if my rules are infallible. I’m still interested in what other people think about the matter of what makes a good stage (or a bad one), even if this thread has been a bit dead this week outside of the videos.
Either way, I’ve linked to the latest video on the front page as well.
(Ugh. I had another stage-related question I was going to ask, but now I’ve forgotten it. Maybe I’ll remember it later.)
I just uploaded my most recent level (my 4th uploaded one), and it’s the best one I’ve managed to do yet (which isn’t saying much). A SMB3 Boo level with light puzzle elements and moderate difficulty.
A3DE-0000-0099-BC2F
If anyone is inclined to try it, I’d love to hear any feedback.
Agreed. This is the most aggravating thing not just in SMB, but in 8-bit platforming games in general. It’s frustrating, a waste of time, and sometimes used as a means of increasing difficulty. To me, it’s just terrible planning/design.
(I’ve added your stage to the front page, Mr Mort, between MrWizard and po pimpus. If you could provide a name when you can to go with it, then I would be grateful.)
Yeah, leaps of faith always suck and unfortunately have been in way too many platforming games, the bulk of them being non-8-bit at this point. In fact, some of the worst leaps of faith from games that came way after the 8-bit generation that had other issues and in general were bad games for other reasons as well, like MMX5 through MMX7. Part of the issue that happens is that even now a lot of games, especially the 3D ones, still grapple with the camera issue and what you can actually see or at least perceive on-screen. Given how long it’s persisted, I doubt that it’s going away any time soon unfortunately.
As far as Mario Maker goes, however, there’s almost no excuse for not fixing any instances of it popping up when you can, which is something even a child should be able to grasp but apparently most can’t despite the fact that they just as soon as turn around complain about the same thing in someone else’s stage. I’m sure a lot of it has to do with the automatic blindspot created upon creating a stage given the difficulty of stepping back and assessing things objectively without the help of someone else, but it’s still annoying to see it pop up a lot, especially since I’m almost certain that in a far too many cases it’s intentional due to the whole “Let’s be Kaizo” thing still going on.
Yep, sorry:
Bones, Bombs, & Boos : A3DE-0000-0099-BC2F
Yeah, many of the blind jumps in Mario Maker can be made bearable by placing coins as a “jump trail”, or arrows guiding the player at the very least, but some peeps just don’t get it.
I was just curious, has anyone completed my level (the Storm Boswer’s Fleet one) in a video? I haven’t actually seen anyone else complete it (or at least remember seeing it), so I just wanted to see how other people deal with everything.