So I got inspired again. And then I edited it because it turns out the beginning of the level was too hard. Right!
**
Vengeance of the Bad Anti-Santas**
ID: 64D5-0000-0129-AAA4
Action-puzzly level where i’m having fun with the mechanics of the new fire clowncopters. Make’em clear a path for you, and don’t die.
Why are they Anti-Santas? ‘Cause of one certain hat. It’s evil and stuff.
This one’s pretty tough. Lots going on. Have fun!
Screenshot:
I’m pleased to see people are actually using check points. I was afraid most people would forget they exist now but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Having said that, I’m not sure if I should use check points when I make my super hard but fair levels that I’ve got planned. The Special Stages in Super Mario World had no check points and they (ESPECIALLY Tubular) were harder for it. It is something I’m gonna have to think on.
I’ve got 72 stars. Nice to see my levels are getting love even though I haven’t fired the game up in about a week or so. I did do some tinkering on a Super Mario World level I’m making.
I’d like more enemies and some more power ups in Super Mario Maker as well. I’d love the spinning spike balls and spike pillars from Super Mario World. I’m positive more updates are on the way that will give us more but as it is, Nintendo gave us a ton of stuff to work with.
Meant to post this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNTbZ7tx4cE
Also will have up at least one more that’ll be out over the holidays. Doing a LOT of uploading right now for various videos, something I tend to forget to do lol.
Fellow Masochists, unite 
Agreed on checkpoints. It really depends, but if you’re not going to use them on a particularly hard level, there has to be a balance of “how much repetitive playing will the player need to do when they die?” That’s probably the hardest balance to strike.
Thing about a lot of hard levels is they don’t tend to think of that and revel in punishing you extremely hard by making you slog through challenges you already conquered. Honestly I’m not a huge fan of it.
If the stage is compact enough that it can be done in one go without a ton of “redo busy work” then I think it works. The moment there’s a lot of “go back and do these things you know how to do but take time because I’m evil”, it does take away from the enjoyability and personally my willingness to try it again.
I think Tubular works, for example, because its a really short level overall - most of the special stages were. Conversely, as classic as SMB 1 is and as hard as world 8 is supposed to be, it always has bugged me that there’s literally no restart points on 8-1 and 8-2. Blech.
So far, most of the levels I’ve played haven’t been super-impacted by not having checkpoints. =)
Psst. Roknin. About that Bowser stage? A hint that I missed the first time I went through too, just by being distracted by other stuff 
Eat the springs.
Yup, I realized it afterwards when watching it again lol! I’ll probably note it down as a “go back and try again” stage soon. 
@roknin Those are some excellent points about checkpoint implementation and I’m very much going to take that stuff to heart and use checkpoints for my super hard but fair stages.
Yeah after watching some people play my STG-Platformer stage, I see where I should’ve put check points. I wasn’t going to at first thinking it would be too easy with them, but it could use them.
I feel the greatest strength of this game is showing just how hard it is to nail design. Then again a lot of stuff like that is probably lost on good percentage of the users.
Would love feedback, if not to just confirm some of my thoughts on the stage, from an outsiders perspective.
I was kinda’ hoping that this game would do just that when they announced it! XD
I learned the hard way when doing game design as a teen, and then playing a lot of old-school PC games that had level editors/designers built in. Trying to do it again nowadays… Shit’s hard, heh. Part of it for me I’m sure is that my brain is way more in “artist mode” nowadays than it used to be. Digging into that train of thought again is super fun though and part of what I love about this game.
S’why I kinda chuckle when I’d hear people talk about “oh man they don’t know how to design levels” in relation to some NSMB stuff or other platformers. Some of the criticism is valid to be sure, but I don’t think enough people really appreciate how much goes into making tons of levels that not only scale in difficulty as the player goes along, but also remains playable and just frustrating enough later on that the player doesn’t lose interest due to dickish level design.
Putting together a level that is addictive to play but hard to complete is a tightrope walk over a pit of lava.
It’s also crazy when looking back at 3D World (and from my understanding 3D Land does the same thing but I skipped that one unfortunately)… a lot of the elements in that game are level specific or shared by no more than 2-3 levels. That’s still nuts to me, to have that many ideas and have the confidence to use them twice in a game that long.
Hell, it’s crazy considering that both it and NSMBWii had to be balanced around the possibility of 1, 2, 3, or 4 players, without ever breaking nor being impossible.
The single level I’m working on now (finally!)… I’m struggling to make sure the damn safeguards I have for one player don’t break the level lmao.
Agreed. I’m 100%ing 3D world now and it’s just an amazing game. One of the best platformers Nintendo has ever made.
I still feel like this and wooly world are highly underrated games because not enough people have a Wii u. These are masterpieces in level design.
Could you imagine if we could play four-player co-op in Mario Maker. No, actually, I’d rather not imagine that, lol. It would be fucking chaos.
Although, I do believe LBP pulled it off…
New course is finally uploaded.
Factory Tour
7A0C-0000-0158-94F4
I was inspired by industrial type levels with this one. Lots of conveyor belts. Its my first stage to use a checkpoint. I question whether or not I should include two checkpoints instead o f one but after running through the level, I figured one would suffice. Since we don’t have crushers or giant spike pillars, I used Thwomps. I had ton of fun with this one.
OMG I FINALLY DID A LEVEL ON MY VACATION
I still want to mess with it and I didn’t get as much time as I wanted to fully test it, but I don’t think its broken.
Some sections were WAY harder on my first few runs lol. Had to massively tone them down since I don’t want to make Kaizo levels. That said, hopefully its still challenging enough.
Piranhas and P-Switches
22E1-0000-0163-116A
Name ended up misspelled… nooooooooooooo D:
I did not. Kinda’ sad I didn’t because I believe I was pretty close. BLARGH.
I plan to come back to it some day, but yah, that vid was going on 45 minutes so I quit… for now.
Aww man I still need to get hands on Wooly World too. So much stuff out right now!
I’ve deleted Thwomp’s Fortress and re-uploaded it as Thwomp’s Castle. Needed to fix something with the boss and added a checkpoint. @T20thoughts please update first post
The new code is AFC8-0000-016F-372D
(That hallway sequence looked painful and not in the fun way.)
Anyway, it would seem that T20thoughts had been picking up the slack in terms of my laziness as of last December, but now that my sound is (tentatively) back, there’s really no excuse for me not having updated the front page as well. As such, roknin’s last three videos are there now, including the 18th, which hasn’t posted in thread.
Fiiiinally finished this level
"EVO-Trooper & The Terrorfields"
5D4A-0000-0173-8979
This is a Puzzle/Exploration course. It’s also a pretty long one. Unfortunately, since unlimited timer isn’t an option, you may run out of time. If any of you guys check it out, would love to get some feedback.
so you can probably tell that i did the level in the smw theme…otherwise i’d take some of the blocks out and just have wall jumping segments…
but as i was finishing the level up i decided to try it in all of the themes to see what would work and what wouldn’t and fell in love with the nsmb theme for this level so i kept it. let me know what you think. i ran out of ideas for a boss fight and i hate putting bowser or bowser jr at the end of a castle level for the most part…
i’m completely out of ideas for boss fights and don’t believe in using an enemy as a boss that isn’t already in the castle itself before you get to it. this is probably the last level i’ll work on until we get more backgrounds and enemies. its been real but its too limited right now IMHO. i went back to the old games and played through both smb3 and world and almost 100%'d super mario 3d world and new super mario bros u…played a little of dkc tropical freeze, etc. to get a better feel for platforming to get more creative. most of what i played through i can’t do due to the limitations.
Played your course debs. Was really fun and surprisingly challenging. Especially liked the first section. I ran into some trouble a couple of times which forced me to restart, though. After I used the P switch to go through the P-Door, there’s a giant thwomp. If you trigger it before the p-switch expires, it will become stuck in the bricks, effectively trapping you.
thanks. i didn’t know that. i need to play test more before i upload. will do in the future.
At last I made a stage. Once I regain Internet I’ll upload it. (it just HAD to go out onceI started playing and building)
