Design Club - Super Mario Bros: Level 1-1 - How Super Mario Mastered Level Design

It's certainly a nice enough script for what it does, and I can see it being useful in some instances, but... a lot of this 'feature tour/tutorial' stuff strikes me as more of an excuse to not worry about ease of use. A good site design should be intuitive in of itself, not something that requires a guided tour to figure out. It's a bit like the modern gaming world to be honest. In the old days, games like Super Mario Bros was designed to teach you through level design, so you'd figure out how things worked without getting a huge info box thrown in your face. Like this: [this video] On the other hand, games since got obsessed with tutorials detailing every minute thing about the title, leading to such over the top insanity as this 'help DVD' included with Super Mario Galaxy 2: [link] These tutorials on sites and in mobile apps remind me all too much of the latter. It's like 'we won't use our product to teach people in a natural way, so we'll put in a guide for complete dummies instead'.

Proper teaching looks less like what most teachers do, and more like what (good) game designers do. • Hide the tutorial for the problem, in the "shape" of the problem, so the student won't even realize they're being taught something. (See e.g. [this video] ) • Make the student/player feel a need for a new tool, before the tool is introduced. Have them try (and perhaps fail) to solve the problem without the tool first. (See the "keys and doors" discussion in [link] ) • For each new concept, present its lesson as a series of spaced-chunk challenges, where each chunk ramps the difficulty up to a climax and then down again to a gentle denouement. Give the learner's mind a chance to feel a sense of mastery over already-understood concepts, not just the continual stress of new challenges. (See [link] or [link] ) • Gate problems behind proof of mastery of previous micro-skills, not just in the form of obvious tests, but also in the form of multi-step problems for new knowledge which can't even be approached without also having another prerequisite skill. Ensure that it becomes impossible to "leave behind" a foundational skill—i.e. ensure that the learner will get stuck without the new tool, and so realize they need to backtrack to pick up that tool, rather than flailing uselessly at the next problem. • Meter and visualize progress. Map acquisition of micro-skills directly to some sort of measurement the student can look at (a level number; a tech tree; a skill grid), to feel that they're

Yes, it's rare, but they have. Game maker's toolkit has one on how they solved their open world problem for BotW: - [link] And at GDC, they talked about their Chemistry engine for BotW: - [link] - [link] Game historian has some tidbits of how they made certain design decisions for their successful games Mario Kart: - [link] Super Mario World: - [link] Super Mario Bro 3: - [link] GMT, Snowman, and Extra credit does analysis of how Nintendo designs their Mario levels. - [link] - [link] - [link] - [link] - [this video] Generally, it follows the ramp up and down of the Hero's journey in storytelling. 1. Introduce a new mechanic in a safe area where it's impossible to die. 2. Increase the challenge with the mechanic by adding variations 3. Ramp up challenge even more by combining with previously learned mechanic 4. Have periods of rest inbetween the challenges.