moonwalksa

What makes a bad level:

Spam. Huge stacks of enemies or lots of pipe/bill enemy launchers that don't exist for any interesting purpose other than to demand perfect platforming or luck.

"Trolling" the player. If I select it from a list and know in advance that it's going to be a lot of Syobon Action-style rudeness and unexpected traps then that's fine, but if I find it through 100 Mario Challenge (as many people will), I'm just going to skip immediately.

Invincibility "puzzles" (too braindead to count as proper puzzles). Giving someone a star and then making them run across a flat bridge of enemies or a bridge of Munchers, or making them do the same using the blinking invulnerability upon getting hit, is really boring. It probably won't make me skip a level on its own because that kind of level is usually quite easy and gives plenty of 1UPs, but it's still lame unless you change it up somehow. This is a million times worse when the required star is inside of an invisible block or other secret area.

Obviously don't force leaps of faith. Full-momentum bouncing jumps are pretty normal and expected, but if you are going to make the player land somewhere that isn't yet on screen, make sure to use a leading coin trail to tell them where they should be shooting for. Even just three coins to mark the expected apex of a jump arc is usually enough.

Unless you're able to use the mechanic really creatively or you need to take away a powerup at a certain point, don't force the player to get hit in order to complete the stage.

What makes a good level:

So many things it's hard to even put them all into words, but I'd say probably the most important is to always be conscious of your screen space. In other words, playtest and keep in mind at all times what the player can or can't see coming. If the player is supposed to travel in a certain direction besides just running to the right, make sure you give them a visual reason to try going that way. Consider what the player will see and experience if they take their time to analyze each obstacle as they get to it. Consider what the player will see and experience if they're trying to move through your level at max speed (unless you want to specifically prevent this, it's a good idea to allow an elegant path for a full sprint run. don't make a level that can be run quickly for most of it and then 3/4 of the way through add an enemy/hazard placement that unavoidably fucks over somebody who was making a jump at full momentum). Have friends play your level in person and observe them, or try to learn how to play your own levels in the ways that a new player might attempt to.

The new unlocks, if you want to go faster than Daily, are based upon time and blocks placed.

Step 1) When a "delivery" arrives with the newest batch of level parts, you have to spend 5 minutes in the editor to unlock the next batch (might also require placing each new item at least once).

Step 2) Once you've spent your 5 minutes and the game tells you that you'll get your next batch on the next day, you can speed it up by making a large chunk of blocks/stuff, highlighting that chunk with the area-select tool, then copying that highlighted chunk repeatedly using the copy tool.

Step 3) Once you've copied a ton of blocks (it should take about a minute of copying, maybe less), the game will say "Your delivery has arrived early!" and give you the next batch right away.

Step 4) Repeat step 1 until you've got all the tools

"We Will Wiggle" - ACD0-0000-0035-082D

"Wingdings" - 7251-0000-002A-50B6

"Fire Piranha Parade" - 53A7-0000-0027-FC5D

No romhack perfect platforming, just some relatively normal-difficulty Mario levels using the tools I had available. I think the Wiggler one turned out especially well.

@cale said:

From the article:

Yikes.

You're right austin, that is a cool picture of a mech.

How did No Man's Sky win anything for E3 2015? I don't mean it doesn't deserve awards, but I was under the impression that it was very deliberately not even being shown.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't basically everybody involved with it constantly saying "We're not showing anything from No Man's Sky at this year's E3"?

You're right, except on the point where "those people who don't normally play games stopped playing games." Some of them did I'm sure, but a huge portion of that new gamer market are people who transitioned to smartphone gaming. It wasn't long after the Wii that iPhone and later Android devices exploded in popularity, to the point that now if someone is carrying a cell phone in the first place, it's almost guaranteed to be a smartphone.

That new gamer demographic is still gaming, but they're doing it on low-priced or free software made to be easily accessible and low-commitment. And since those people are unused to more traditional games, their standards are also not high - the main concerns are simply cost and how easy it is to get into, both of which are addressed extremely well by the standard f2p style of many mobile games. Demographically, to keep the Wii's boom audience, Nintendo would have had to compete with a platform that is handheld, ubiquitous, and populated by free products with extremely low production costs.

R.I.P. Konami, hope you're happy about killing Castlevania and MGS. Have fun making f2p phone schemes.

I want to be able to vote for both of the options, because it 100% absolutely is both of those things.

Kojima almost certainly has the money to start his own studio by now. Obviously not on the extremely high budget level of what MGS has been, but new smaller-scale games by Kojima Productions seems a whole lot more likely to me than him agreeing to get snapped up by Sony or MS, especially since the rights to Metal Gear aren't going with him.

He's always been arguably the most important videogame auteur, so it makes sense for him to branch out into a role that gives him more creative freedom than a company demanding more MGS or MGS-likes. I'd expect to see projects from him of about the same not-quite-high-budget scale as dudes like Swery or Suda51, and that seems like a perfect fit.