In Lesson 3 the Workshop created a wide variety of gameplay ideas by making Bonus Rooms. Despite excluding all elements that could hurt Mario, the rooms were quite challenging. This week, we set aside the coins to focus on enemies.

If you play the game for the first time with no prior knowledge, you're going to run into the first Goomba and lose a turn. ~ Iwata

Needless to say, enemies are far more dangerous and complex than coins. Enemies move on their own, attack in different ways, and are weak to various attacks. There are many properties of enemies that differentiate one versus another and facilitate a rich range of functions.

The Properties of Enemies...

Enemies can Be...

• Susceptible to gravity or not.
• Physical (bouncing off other enemies and level elements) or not.
• Defeatable or not.
• Stompable or not.
• Spin-Jumpable or not.
• Harmful to the touch or not.
• Vulnerable to Mario's Fireballs or not.
• Vulnerable to Tail / Cape attacks or not.
• Vulnerable to Super Star Mario or not.
• Vulnerable to Dry Shell Mario / Buzzy Mario / Spikey Mario or not
• Vulnerable to ground pounds or not.
• Responsive to Mario's position or not.
• Transformable (e.g. retreating into a shell) or not.
• Normal, Special, Big, Winged, or some combination of these.
• Placeable into a Pipe / Blaster or not.
• Stackable or not

Super Mario Bros. platforming gameplay is relatively simple: move and jump around through a course avoiding obstacles to get to the end goal. Part of what makes Mario's gameplay so deep, is the variety of ways he can engage with level element and enemy elements. Though the below list of engagement types is shorter than the above list of properties, each type of engagement allows for distinct gamplay experiences that can be mixed and matched via level design.

Mario can Engage Enemies by...

• Avoiding them altogether.
• Defeating them at close range.
• Defeating them at long range.
• Defeating them using the environment.
• Using other enemies against them.
• Transforming them and using the result.
• Carrying them around.

Assignment#3 Challenged uS to Design Enemy GauntletS

The Enemy Bingo challenged us Once Again to Design according to constraints.

While the Workshoppers did well with the bonus rooms assignment, we struggled with the enemy based challenges. Instead of roughly 3 types of coins in 3 states possible states (floating, in a block, fallen due to gravity), we had 35 enemy elements to consider with dozens of types. That's 9 coin combinations versus 1120 enemy combinations!

Compared to coins, the added complexity of enemies is significant. It was more challenging to understand the properties of each enemy, the ramifications of their placement, and ways to teach the player how to engage with the gameplay idea. This is not to mention the increased difficulty of preventing soft locks or preventing the player from circumventing the gameplay altogether.

With our Bonus Rooms, it was easy to understand the minimum and maximum levels of player engagement. At minimum, players just run straight to the room exit. At maximum, players work to collect each coin and discover any potential secret. What is not obvious is that every degree of engagement between these two extremes is incredibly clear and part of the same gameplay idea. In other words, getting half the coins in a room is half the experience. Players can leave any number of coins behind if they find that the challenge is too hard or not interesting. With this design players have a lot of control over the difficulty of their experience.

Most of our Enemy Gauntlets did not present a smooth range of experiences for players to engage with. Like most video game puzzles, our puzzle-like enemy rooms tend to only have one solution. This means the player either solves the puzzle or they fail. These extremes cover the min and maximum degrees of engagement, and they unfortunately leave nothing in between. If the player isn't forced to solve the puzzle to progress, they often skip it. When playing our puzzle rooms, it was common for Workshoppers to say something like, "I didn't understand that room at all, so I moved on."

Furthermore, the inherent complexity of enemies in our Gauntlet rooms made it much more difficult for us to teach the player naturally. Without a course leading up to the room to introduce concepts in a safe way and without the ability to develop the complexity of key concepts through multiple challenges, the extreme room-to-room variety gave our Enemy Gauntlet rooms an additional layer of challenge. It was more difficult for players to adapt. In other words, using the Enemy Bingo Board put the Workshop into 'hard mode.'

This gave us a real headache. We needed somehow to make sure the player understood... [we] have to teach the player in a natural way. ~Miyamoto

Nearly every room from our Enemy Gauntlets presents a unique gameplay idea. A useful way to organize the 80+ room challenges is according to two axes: puzzle challenge to platformer challenge; and linear execution to varied strategies.

In the end the assignment #3 submissions may make you laugh, cry, or rage just a little bit. We learned a lot from the exercise making sure to extract many principles we hope to follow moving forward.

Recap Stream for Week 4

An extemporaneous stream in which KirbyKid recaps the week in detail. Content includes a walk through the Enemy Gauntlet Submissions for Assignment #3.