WELL DONE WORKSHOP!

I am very proud of every member of the Mario Maker Workshop. These last 20+ weeks have been a dream to teach game design, an experiment in learning methods, and a privilege to work with so many passionate and dedicated designers. I thank everyone for their participation and hope that we continue to work together creatively in the future.

It is amazing how much more smoothly game development goes when everyone shares a common language. Not just a common language; a critical-language. It's one thing for me to say this having created critical-gaming and Design Oriented out of my desire to understand, articular, and share my love of game design. It's another thing for people who I only met through this workshop to graduate believing the same.

Level design is more complicated than many workshoppers ever thought. And Super Mario Bros. platforming gameplay is a lot deeper than even our most dedicated workshoppers + Nintendo fans knew. After 20+ weeks we all have a better idea of how much more there is to learn.

Game design is hard work. I don't think people realize how much work it takes to excel at a craft. One of the goals of the Mario Maker Workshop was to make the work required to achieve greatness as transparent as possible. The following is summary of our activity as recorded in our collaborative, could based, public, online spreadsheet.

Summary

In total the workshop has 17,738 workshop points with the highest member scoring 3,617 points.

Workshop members have submitted 235 courses for analysis. 3895 individual points of feedback were filled out for these courses.

The Workshop collected 603 individual pieces of knowledge about Super Mario Maker 2.

The Workshop collected 433 unique gameplay ideas from small gizmos to complete course concepts.

The Workshop devised from experience and extracted from study 184 design principles.

The workshop completed 15 collaborative, asynchronous course projects using our task management system called the Workbench.

The Future

The learning is a journey of self improvement that never ends. Though this is the end of the first session of the Mario Maker Workshop, that only means the streams and the lessons have stopped. The spreadsheet and the discord channel will remain open. So, keep creating courses! Keep learning! And keep the community going!

We have a lot more ideas for assignments, plenty of untapped gameplay ideas, and potential updates from Nintendo that would expand the design space from which we craft courses. Personally I'd love to do the whole workshop over again with a focus on co-op and versus level design.

Special thanks to my Marcus, my brother, and Bleach. Both were my sounding board for designing the workshop curriculum. They were always there to help me figure out how everything was going to work.

Special thanks to Golem for web technical help. I thought he did everything I asked of him for free. Turns out he was he was charging me taking my world records.

Thanks to Rami for retweeting the Mario Maker Workshop. A handful of workshoppers came as a result of that retweet.

Thanks Nintendo for making Mario, Super Mario Maker 2, and eventually adding the features I considered to be 'must haves' before I made my day 1 purchase. Those features were "just what I needed."

12/16/19 Design Oriented @KirbyKid Richard Terrell