Building a puzzle starting from a pretty basic dig idea (Ludum Dare 48)

( I wrote this for the Ludum Dare page, then I realized I should probably post it here too. Here's the original post)

It was my first ranked Game Jam

It's been a year, I am starting to be more serious with my game designer goals so this time and a special LD # 48 seemed like a great opportunity.

Designers have various priorities with their games. In my case my top concern lately is the mechanics. My goal is to make enjoyable, interesting puzzles and I think that at the center of it is, or should be an interesting set of mechanics. Once you have the interesting mechanics, even building the levels is pretty fun to do.

Had to deal with the theme

On Friday the theme was announced: "Deeper and Deeper" . This was, in fact, one of my least favorite themes from the voting :/ Mostly because all it makes me think of is digging. And when I think digging, the first mental image I get is digging Super Mario Bros 2 - style:

I tried and I tried and this is where I kept defaulting towards. Maybe we can add rocks? Then it would be something like platforming sokoban. Except that this has been done quite a bit. It was getting late so I started coding.

Using puzzlescript

I am not good at making game graphics or sound or music. I know some code, but not video game code... I do have access to a secret weapon: puzzlescript. With Puzzlescript it's completely possible to make a game , including sprites and audio all from its editor and without having to be very good at either of them. It's puzzlescript, everything is 5x5, so your sprites don't need that much detail.

Most importantly, it helps me implement new mechanics quickly and play with them using the editor.  Figure out if they work out...

Finding the interesting thing

How about, instead of just moving the rocks , you are throwing them? And they roll. This is when I've decided to post my first preview image.

But the main mechanic is supposed to be digging. It sounds weird that digging doesn't do much, then?  What I was missing was a way to have chain reactions. That's where this idea came from, what if, after digging some earth, adjacent earth would fall down?



That's what's cool about puzzle script, you can prototype these things quickly and see how they fare when you are trying to design levels from them. I was able to notice that something still lacked. Digging is destructive. I even added a mechanic that makes rocks destroy earth when they hit it. It was so destructive that levels had a tendency to go to one direction and there was never a need for backtracking.

Added a paint of coat

But time was moving on so I also had to make the game look and feel better. My goal in the second day was to focus on that sort of stuff and make levels. Even though I wasn't really completely happy with the mechanics, still missing something...

Puzzlescript only lets you have 5x5 sprites. But there are ways to avoid making the game's looks be *too* simplistic. One of the first things I do is add borders to walls, combining multiple wall sprites into the same object. This gives them more of a body. Another thing that's really important is the color scheme. For this stuff I use a special tool called gPick, it lets you find colors and generate color variations.



It's subtle but the walls aren't of a solid color, there are some variations there, same with the sand. Gpick is also useful for finding shades.

And a shiny mechanical cherry on top

I was supposed to build more levels but I kept having issues with the directionality of the design.  I was starting to shuffle teleportation ideas. If there was a way to return to an area after destroying some sprites and falling down, then there would hopefully be more flexibility in levels. But the problem was how to add teleportation without making it too hard to code (and draw) and also without making the game sci-fi, because it's supposed to be about digging.

I settled for this gem idea. In games about digging in dungeons there's usually treasure. It's odd that the game didn't have treasure. But what if... MAGIC GEMS.



Gems expand on the second mechanic, picking things. And they also combine with the other things, they are affected by gravity, so they expand on the falling-ground mechanic. And once I had those gems, the level ideas became more exciting. It was already late in the compo, so this addition only affected 3 new levels, but it was so much fun to build them.

Please check my game out, it's in need of ratings!

If you like puzzle games where the mechanics are the priority, even above graphics and other things. Using an engine that's built for these sort of thinky game, because it has an undo button and a level skip. Then give my game a try.

• Play the game at itch.io
  
• Give the honest rate at the game's page
  

 

 

Part 1: What I've learned from Kye

Recently I've felt a big urge to write about game design. So let me start with a story.

I was a Bolivian kid in the later 90s whose family just acquired a computer. Something my parents did really well was nurture my love for computers. So I would always convince them to buy me a new Magazine about computers. Back then we didn't even have cybercafes so computer magazines, were the way you'd acquire shareware software. The magazines would come with these CD-ROMs full of software selections you could try out.

What I loved the most, were the games. Which were pretty rare. Most of the times the CDs would come with mostly utilities like stuff like icon editors (I actually loved to make icons?). But every once in a while, they would come with shareware games. It's strange how, regardless of how many of those I must have tried over the years, there's only a handful that I actually remember.

One day I found a true jewel. Some guy from the UK made a charity ware game called "Kye", with some really random ideas. You were a green circle, which apparently is supposed to represent the author's dog. There were monsters for some reason. But mostly the soul of this game was puzzles involving blocks. You can play the original 2.0 version for free at archive.org

From what I remember, at first I wasn't even able to really beat level 3, but the good news is that there was a level editor. There must have been something about the weird visual style or the simplicity of the level editor that I've made countless of levels. None of them were any good, but in the process I did discover some interesting iterations between the objects. It was also very practical that levels were basically txt files. You could actually "see" the level when editing it with a text editor. I guess the fact that it had 'arcade' elements such a monsters was the main thing that made me want to make levels, it was all about obstacle courses back then.

Kye's gameplay

If I were to make the simplest Kye level that explains what it is about, I would make this:

The goal of Kye is to get all the "diamonds" (those blue things). You get diamonds by moving the player character (green circle) to their cells. You move the player character using the cursor keys (You can also use the mouse if you are a horrible person). But what's interesting here is the yellow squares with a red arrow drawn on them. These arrow blocks will always attempt to move towards the direction indicated by the arrow, and will only stop when something is blocking them. In this case, the diamond in the middle is blocking them. But if you were to grab the two right-most diamonds, a thing would happen:

Now, Kye (the player) can push arrow blocks, but in this case it would only bring more problems:

Kye is trapped. Kye should have started with the left-most diamond and this wouldn't have been a problem.

All of kye involves making this sort of choice. There are many elements in the game that just make this choice more interesting. Some blocks can make the arrow blocks rotate. Other blocks are just normal static blocks that you can use to stop arrow blocks or do other things. There are "black holes" that will just destroy anything that you push onto them or any arrow block that moves towards them. There are "Bouncers" that can push any block, including the arrow blocks. Rounded arrow blocks slide diagonally when they hit another rounded object. Clock blocks will constantly create arrow blocks. And the magnets can allow you to bypass some of these complications, or they can also stick to you in  a way that traps you in a similar way.

But the Coolest thing about Kye, just happens to be the main thing you learn from the solution to level 3, the level that I initially had no idea whatsoever how to fix. And it is that Kye is a real time game. The arrows, the bouncers and the monsters won't wait for your moves, they have a life of their own.

This is what happens when  you attempt to solve Level 3 without thinking:

So you can't really get that top-left diamond because the arrows will block the path. What now?

The trick to solve this (and maybe if you really want to give this game a try, you should give it a try before reading this) is to plan ahead and make sure the bouncers are synchronized correctly. The bouncers will clean up the arrows by themselves.

 

And this, this is the power of Kye. There's 20x30 cells, which at first may seem like a huge amount of cells for this style of a puzzle game, but the reality is that the level designer will need plenty of room to be able to build of sorts  of machines, combining the various elements. These machines are the real core of Kye's gameplay. That's why it is a real-time and not turn-based. 

 This is ultimately what I've learned from Kye. It's all about the machines. Different gameplay elements can make something bigger than the sum. But it all requires some thought about what the elements will be. If done correctly, levels can take a life of their own.

Opposite Forces [v4]

I should really post here more often. Here goes a level presentation:

 

[Bookmark Site Link]

It's a tough one-screen puzzle. Currently rated super expert with 1% completion rate. The following explains how to solve this level. If you'd like to try it on your own you should avoid reading. You can also stop reading after each new step so you can try starting solving on your own at that point. There are other solutions that need extra dexterity, but this is the one I initially intended.

Going to that door 

There's 3 sets of doors. The door on top of the lava bridge connects to the door at the top. The two P-doors (seen as outlined rectangles) are, of course, connected to each other. There is also the door at the center that takes to the final area. The objective of the level is to be able to enter this door AND also have an active P-switch so that the P-doors can be used and you can reach the Axe. 

I recommend first simplifying the level. Forget about the P-doors. Our first objective is to learn how to reach the door at the center so that we can reach that area next to the Thwomp.

Pipe object cloning

If we plan to enter that door, it appears that we need a bunch of objects below it so that Mario can stand on them and enter the door. There seems to be a notorious lack of those objects. The distance from the ground to that door is 7 squares. And counting the P switch and Pow from the two pipes, we only have 3 objects available. Something is strange here.

The first mechanic we should learn is that we can "clone"  objects that come out of pipes by using doors. Hold an object, and enter the top door:

This causes you to leave holding a P-switch, but the interesting thing is the Pipe spawns another P-switch.

This trick can only clone the object you are holding while entering the door. So it works at most once. So we only have access to 4 objects.

The door and the conveyor belt

There are two main conveyor belts and they work in opposite directions. The main mechanic in this puzzle is to take advantage of this so that you can use them to build a 'bridge' between them. Like this:

So you have two objects held above above the conveyor belts and we just need one more object on top of them to enter the door. The problem is that the conveyor belts are of different lengths and speeds so it is non-trivial to put objects on them so that they meet at exactly the same time. This is where the P switch enters. Note that if you use a P switch, there's still three other objects available, enough to build our entrance. The P-switch can stop conveyor belts from moving AND also turn the two yellow blocks into coins so that we can drop objects there so that they meet.

All that we need is to move all three objects currently at the bottom to the top. This is not as hard as it sounds. P-switches can be thrown upwards and Mario can take the Pow block with him.

Now all that we need to do is put a Pow block on top of a yellow block. Then press the P switch. The Pow falls on top of the conveyor belt. Be ready to drop the other P switch on the other conveyor belt. 

If you time things correctly, the two objects will meet at the same time:

Now all is ready, you can get to the the center area, take that pow block and drop it below the door.

The real Puzzle

Now we just need to find a way to enter that door while a P switch is active. It's not that difficult really. If you return two steps back, just hold the Pow block and press the P switch next to the Pow block, since P-switch stops the Conveyor Belt, the other Pow will not fall, this allows you to drop the pow block on top:

Hope it was fun.

The Beach Koopa Saga.

These are four one-screen puzzles that shouldn't exist. But do. I think they make interesting puzzles, but the mechanics they rely on might be too obscure.

• Double Jump: 379C-0000-00A1-8BF7
• Often Overlooked: 2B4B-0000-00E9-D056
• Koopa Alchemy:  FA8A-0000-00EA-8A07
• Cloning and Color: D3DA-0000-00E7-F31B

I recommend attempting to solve them in order. This is the place to come to in case you are really curious about how to solve them. If you want to read more about one-screen puzzles (actually puzzle levels in general) I have a whole post about them and I am kinda explaining the levels in this post using that framework I explained there. The following paragraphs contain spoilers. If you needed to read spoilers for one puzzle, try to still solve the later puzzle(s) on your own. It might be fun/frustrating, I hope.

Double Jump

This one is the easiest puzzle I could come up to that makes use of the mechanic I wanted to highlight here.

Contradiction: You need to stomp on the Koopa to climb to the top so you can then get to the right. But then you will find yourself unable to jump to the exit. So I guess you could instead take the Koopa's shell with you, but you can't take the shell with you because you need to jump.

It seems that experienced players fall into thinking that they need to use a shell jump glitch  to solve this level, but I intended something far simpler. 

Mechanic: The mechanic tying all these puzzles together is that in Super Mario World, stomping on a koopa makes the Koopa leave their shell. It looks like those shell-less koopas are called "Beach Koopa".

Implementation: In this situation you need to take advantage of the poor beach Koopa. Stomp on the Koopa to make them leave the shell. But to make it so it's hard to do this accidentally, I made it so it is kind of unlikely the beach koopa will drop in the right location unless you do it intentionally. Wait for the Koopa to stand up and then grab the shell and stomp on the Koopa again so you can reach the top holding the Shell. The last jump might be tricky to some people. The easiest way is to drop the shell and spin jump on it. I guess you can also kick the shell and stomp on it at the right moment, but that's a life-threatening stunt.

Often Overlooked

Hehe, I didn't notice that I took the screenshot with the comments on.

Contradiction: Like in the previous level, you can use the often overlooked Beach Koopa and the shell separately. First you use a similar trick to be able to grab the P switch (you need to kick the shell towards the yellow block below the P-switch). You will also need the trick to reach the top. Once you reach the right side you will find yourself on a strange situation. You need to press the P switches spawned by the pipe 3 times, but even if you are lucky and a Beach koopa is available to climb, you can only do it one time. What's up with that?

Hint / Diversion: The first p switch exists really as a distraction. Or maybe so that it's necessary to know that you can stomp on Beach Koopas before continuing. At the top there is a yellow block next to a coin. It's there to explain that to go through this you need to press the P switch and then wait until its music ends. Also this time it is easy and likely that a red Beach Koopa will fall towards the saws' area so that you hopefully can see that you can use this koopa to make the jump towards the yellow blocks.

Mechanic: This is where the saga turns obscure. The trick in this level is how SMW red koopas work when put inside pipes. Generally, the red koopa won't respawn unless they leave the screen or get killed. In SMW's case, what matters for the respawn condition is just the shell. As long as the shell leaves the screen, the red koopa respawns. Even if the Beach Koopa is still available. So by stomping on the red koopas and throwing the shell outside but leaving the beach koopa alive, you can make the tube create an indefinite number of beach koopas.

Implementation: Stomp on the red koopa in such a way that the Beach Koopa is thrown to the saws area. Clone the koopas and Do this 3 or 4 times. Having 3 koopas might be a bit risky because a mistake while using the P switches will force you to restart. Having 5 or more beach koopas is risky because it might be too crowded and they can still kill you.

Update: I fixed an unwanted alternate solution (cheese), it's possible to jump on a P switch in mid-air. So I had to change it so it is not possible (I hope) to move the pipe-create P-switches at all. Also added a reset door and some other minor changes.

Koopa Alchemy

If you thought the last one required too much an obscure knowledge to work, that's because you didn't see this one yet. This level is terrible!

Also this level really had so much cheese possibilities, there's a reason it's in version 3 four right now. I really hope it doesn't have more ways to cheese it without using the intended mechanic, but I can't make guarantees. Maybe you can find more ways.

Examples of cheese in previous versions:

• There used to be a giant goomba in a more open space instead of that wiggler. It was possible to kill it with a shell without losing the shell.
• Spin jumping on the Thomps. That's the reason the space is so tight now. Update: In fact, this was still possible, had to make a whole new version. I hope those munchers stop the cheese once and for all!
• Walking on top of the thomps. In the past, to make the implementation easier, there was a semi-solid platform in the thomp area. Bad idea.
• Grabbing the P switch. The wall between the start location and the P switch didn't exist, even though the P switch was lower, it was possible to grab it, somehow.
• Killing the thomps with a pow when they 'touch' the ground. The wings in thomps are intended so that you need to throw the pows directly at them to kill them, but when there's not a lot of space for the pows and they touch the ground (even though they are still flying) they can be killed remotely with the pow.

Contradiction: You need the Pows and the only way to acquire them is (I hope) by pressing the P switch. In order to do it you forcefully (I hope) lose the two shells, one is needed to kill the wiggler and there should be no way to do it without losing a shell. The other is needed to make the Bill blaster drop on the P-switch. So in order to take the Pows to the Thomps , you will need to stomp on the beach koopas. But unfortunately, one of the beach koopas is red, so they won't drop to the ground. And you need (I hope) to stomp on two beach koopas to be able to take the two pows with you.

The Mechanic: So what we need is two green beach koopas, but we only have a green one and a red one. Just change the red one's color! Stomp on the two koopas and make it so the red beach koopa enters the green shell. This turns the koopa's shoes green! Really.

Implementation: You need to be careful in stomping the koopas to change their color, it's too easy to kill something you don't want to kill.

 Cloning and Color

This one is really the combination of the two last ones. You'll need to combine both techniques to cross that spike area.

Contradiction: The only way (I hope) to cross above those spikes and reach the axe is by leaving the area with green beach koopas. But there's only one of them and in a completely wrong location.

Mechanic: Just clone some six or so red beach koopas and use the green shell to turn them green.

Implementation: Easier said than done, a bad stomp might make you lose the green shell, or kill all the green beach koopa you've been creating. But I was nice this time and added a door that allows you to reset the whole deal without losing a life. I should really try to use these doors more often in one-screen puzzles. An issue is that they might have unintended consequences. For example, a previous version of "Koopa Alchemy" had a reset door, but it was possible to exploit it to change the position of a pow block and then you can use the green koopa to get the other pow block.

-------------
I hope these were fun.

The Incredible Rotation Warp - Version 7, I mean 8

I just recently wrote a whole post about version 6 of this rotation idea. I was hoping not to need to update it in a while. But today I got an idea and an urge to implement it.

Id: A270-0000-00D5-F33D

Basically, you now start the game on the (previously-inexistent) "right" area. This right area becomes inaccessible once you use the first pipe. There are many advantages about this, in theory:

• This way I don't need that extra entry pipe in the rotation room. I noticed that people kept getting confused trying to enter it. With only 3 pipes in this area it is hopefully less confusing.
• Getting to see this (right) area shall help figuring out that the map rotates quicker.
• This also works as a good excuse to include some fire flower powerups in (left) and (down) areas.
• I also changed the name back to "The Incredible Rotation Warp".

I worry that some things like having 3 enemies in the rotation room again would make the level too complex. Let more updates come. Iterative Game Development is going to be the end of me.

Update: And.. an eight one. Just some small tweaks, making it easier to move the spring across. Removed some elements that made the camera scroll up in the final section after flying. Aesthetic tweaks too.

A Spinning World

id: A270-0000-00D5-F33D

Update: Further updates in new post: Versions 7, 8

A month ago I had what I thought was a cool, original idea. There were already many levels based around flipping the screen vertically / horizontally. Really "all" you need to do is make a warp zone that's identical to the main zone but with everything flipped. The next logical step was think of rotation instead of just flipping.  With there being four different versions of the same world, each being equal to the previous one rotated 90 degrees right. How was I going to implement it? My idea was quite clear:

So I just needed two things, the room with that pipe that rotates everything and the room with the puzzle. In reality I would need to make 4 versions of each room. The first step was to see if the rotating room is possible at all. You see, let's name the rooms for each diection A (up), B (right), C (left) and D (down). I wanted the same pipe to take you from A to B, from B to C, from C to D and from D to A.

You can place pipes on top of other pipes, even warp pipes. This seems to be an intentional move by nintendo because with this it is easy to make a situation in which entering any of two (or more) pipes takes you to the same exit pipe. Thanks to a reddit thread I found out that it works in reverse as well: If you enter a pipe that has multiple entry points, it will always pick one of them. Priority depends on the order the pipes were placed in the map. Latter tubes have more priority. So I was just adding pipes trying to keep the correct priority going and correcting when it's wrong. After half an hour, it started to seem impossible. Because it is impossible.

We have four pipes: A-B, B-C, C-D and D-A, we want B-C to have a larger priority than A-B, C-D a larger priority than B-C, D-A larger than C-D and A-B larger than D-A. This is an impossible cycle. Sorry.

The only way to fix it was to remove the cycle somehow, but I didn't want to change the original idea of having a single tube to rotate it all. Then I had a an idea: There's a room in which the pipe would appear top. We can make it so high that you cannot jump through any normal means, and need a spring. So add a whole new pipe that can only be used in the (up) room and takes you to a room that it includes a spring. When you exit this spring room, you are actually taken to a different (but identical-looking) version of (up): (up').

So now there is an up area A, and another up area A', an spring area called E. We have pipes like A'-B, B-C, C-D, D-A, A-E, A'-E, and there's no cycle. There's a bit of a problem and it is that now there's a whole new room to complicate the original idea, and worse, you need to go through it every time you want to change the gravity direction once you are top.

Another issue is that this would make me run out of warp pipes quite quickly. Remember I need one from start to rotation room and 4 pipes between rotation room and puzzle room, on top of all those pipes mentioned above. The warp pipe limit is 10. I fixed this by making it so the puzzle room can't be accessed when the world direction is right.  Also the exit would have to be directly connected to the puzzle room.

But at least the rotation was working, I was truly excited and proceeded to think of the puzzle. It would have three version: Up, Down and Left. It makes sense that Left is the one that takes you to the exit.

Spoilers (Although this is an old version, the new version has a different puzzle area but the idea is roughly the same).

• The "left" area is connected to the exit but you need a Rakoon Suit to fly that large gap.
• This quite works well because if we rotate this, then the exit would be unreachable or be part of a deadly free fall.
• The four question blocks contain raccoon leaves, the only way to get them is jumping against them. This needs you to use a P to turn the coins into blocks and to be able to stand on them. This means that to get the raccoon leaf, you need the direction to be (up) and an active P switch.
• The only way (I thought) to activate the P switch is when the direction is (down), so you have to activate the switch and then go to the rotating room until you reach the (up) direction. Since this (unfortunately) requires the spring room and it would take too much time, this is the reason the spring room has a P switch that you can only active when you enter it while another P is active.

I was quite proud of this, so I published it. I tried to get some plays going, the first versions had too low success rates and many crosses in the rotating area, so I reduced the number of enemies. These are screenshots of the fourth edition, things like there being 4 question blocks instead of just one came from attempts to make the level more friendly.

I published it to /r/MarioMaker.  I tried to get streamers to play it. I passed it around a bit. I thought this idea was very original and that people would love it. The results, however, were ... underwhelming.

 

More Work

To be fair, 11 stars is not that bad. Most of my levels stay in one-digit star amounts. But as the time passed I found multiple people who implemented the rotation idea in more successful ways: Like /u/saintlantis and /u/GamingfulLuke . Their levels got like hundreds of stars. I can only dream of ever making such a good level. But what I take from all of this is that this old "Rotation Warp" idea needed more work. In Level design, it's not enough to have a nice idea and know how to implement it.

Where to start in updating this level? By coincidence I saw the same streamers (supertwou) play both my level and saintlantis'. The biggest impression I could get was that it was far easier to tell that their level is about rotation. It helps that the rotation does not only happen in a small room, it's clearer that all of the map rotates. I cannot really change the idea of the level too much (Or I would be making a whole new level instead of modifying it), I still need to keep a single room for rotation. But I can still improve the situation a bit.

This is the new rotation room. I hope the extra asymmetry can help.

I also further reduced the number of enemies, only two of them now. Let the difficulty come from noticing that the thing rotates.

I am willing to bet the spring room is one of the reasons the previous version was too confusing. We need the spring room to exist, but I reduced the number of times you need to go to it. I moved the spring room to the (right) room. This way the only reason to use the spring is to use the rotation pipe, as there is no puzzle area in the right room, you don't need the spring to get to any of the puzzle areas.

Another very subtle thing is that the arrows in the rotation room pointed to the opposite direction than their respective puzzle rooms. I fixed this :)

I changed the special effect that plays whenever you use the rotation pipe. I used to use the telephone effect, but it shows graphics in random places of the string. Instead the Car Horn effect shows a flower circle in the pipe.

I also made plenty of changes to the puzzle area:

 

I added an arrow right next to the pipe. This should help notice that direction is important. The actual puzzle area looks very different too. Spoiler: I don't want to spoil things too much but here are some details:

•  Having the additional P switch in the spring room was giving too much importance to that room, which should really be just an additional step in changing one of the directions. So now you need to activate the P (without taking it out of the puzzle area) rotate the map correctly and go back to the puzzle area before the P activation runs out.
• So there are only two ways to activate the P, you cannot activate the P in the (up) version because it can't be reached. You can activate the P in the (left) version, but you get stuck (a plant will rescue you, but the plant only activates AFTER the P runs out). So you need to activate the P in the (down) room.
• There are many reasons I changed the rows of coins into that device. The first is that coins were just confusing, people would think that they have to eat them and could fall down. Also, if you eat them, why would they come back when rotating the level? Keeping coins and blocks inside an isolated area helps against this confusion. It should be both clearer and more interesting to see how gravity direction affects the shell device. (I hope).
• There is also a bit of a safeguard in case you decide to leap of faith in the (down) version of the room. An extra chance to retract and go back to safety (that question mark spawns a vine).

Thanks for reading (I'd be really surprised if anyone actually found this interesting). I hope the new version works out!

One-screen puzzles

Shortly after Mario Maker's release date, Seth Bling of youtube fame published a level entitled "One-screen puzzle".

Levels featuring puzzles in a single screen were not a novelty, but what was and what made this level worthy of that name that implies it's THE One-screen level was that the solution was very interesting definitely not trivial and you could spend an hour trying to solve this level. It got quite a bunch of stars and a place in the elusive top 100. It made the genre rise in popularity and Seth made other 4 such puzzles since then.

As a fan of puzzle games I couldn't help but try my own take on these levels.

 Pow It - (course id: 30CB-0000-0098-7220)

 

Living Fire (course id: 9334-0000-0090-111E)

 Flight Day (course id: 82B6-0000-0093-FA1D)

So let's talk one-screen puzzles.

About Puzzles Levels

I may have spent a good amount of free time making levels for a puzzle game to be left unnamed for now. When I think of puzzles there are some things to find interesting. Light spoilers for Seth Bling's puzzle :

• The mechanic(s): A puzzle level in a game like Mario that has plenty of kinds of objects and combinations between them should center around a game mechanic (you call them gimmicks when you don't like them). A player that finishes the level should leave with a new learned trick. The better and more interesting/unique the mechanic the cooler the level will be.  If you want to you can try and make a single level about multiple mechanics. It can really up the difficulty and make it more challenging but this is risky as it makes the level more confusing. I prefer centering around a single thing, specially in one-screen ones where space is tight. In Seth Bling's level above I'd say the key thing is the way the P switch is actually more solid than the caparace. That's something I didn't keep present until solving it. 
•  The contradiction: The mechanic acts like a key, lacking the key should lead to game states in which things don't make much sense. In a Portal level, you need to push two buttons under a time limit so tight that you almost need to be two places at once. In Seth Bling's puzzle, you need to use the spring both to jump and also to send objects in another path, and it appears that one usage negates the other.
• The diversion: The solution to the puzzle needs certain objects but just leaving them might make it too obvious that they are needed there and might make the solution seem trivial or worse, happen by total coincidence without the player realizing it. Giving some objects fake / initial roles and requiring the player to take them out of them can be a nice detail. In Seth Bling's puzzle, the red koopa's evident use is to help save Yoshi.
• The Hints: On the other hand, you don't want the player to feel clueless about things. If the mechanic is way original the player might need help getting there. This help is really one of the hardest parts of puzzle design. You want the player to feel clever. So the clues shouldn't be super explicit, but the player should also not feel lost for too long. In Mario Maker that means they'll skip the level in a flash.
• The Implementation: Just knowing what to do is one thing, doing it is another topic. Implementation and logic are often at odds. Too much logic and the puzzle is a pure brain teaser. While cool, it wouldn't fit too well in Mario. Too much implementation and the level is not that much of puzzle anymore. Difficulty is another thing. I dislike puzzles in which implementation is difficult because, to me, it adds frustration. You are the player and you KNOW how to solve this but the stupid puzzle just won't let you actually do it. This is the part I like least about Seth Bling's puzzle levels. After figuring it out I still needed 40 or so attempts before getting it right, at that point the level felt more like a Kaizo level than a puzzle.

If you want to try my puzzles on your own (pleeaaaase someone play my levels!) you should stop reading as I am about to spoil them big time.

Pow It

Pow It is in my opinion the easiest of the bunch. The mechanic it centers around is very simple: The Pow block makes coins fall down, this includes blocks that turned into coins because of the P switch. Big deal huh? Well you see, the contradiction is that if you don't know this there are many ways in which you'll get trapped.

The main diversion exists as the Muncher next to the P switch. Your first reflex will be to use the Pow to kill it so you can grab the P switch.

But doing means you failed the puzzle, remember the intended solution is to use the Pow while the P is active. It's not all that bad though, because using the Pow this way makes the Hint happen; The 3 coins will fall, reminding you that Pow makes coins drop.

How can this be solved? It's my least favorite part of the puzzle. I mentioned how I don't like tricky implementation, but it turns out it might be needed to be able to correctly disguise the solution. In Seth Bling's level, it's hard to make the caparace stop so you can use it again. This makes thinking of using the caparace that way less trivial. In Pow It, it appears you need to kill the Muncher to get the P switch, but it isn't exactly so...

If you somehow gently drop the Pow above the Muncher you can walk on it then with some luck you can jump and fall on the P switch. This makes the Muncher drop in height a bit allowing you to take back the pow (be careful).

I think this part of the level may have creeped a bit over what I originally intended. Are players even supposed to know how to drop the pow without activating it? That you can use it to walk on top of harmful areas?

I may do something like update the level so the pow starts on a Muncher and you can walk on it at first. Better hints or it makes it too obvious?

Living Fire

Living Fire is my favorite of the bunch because the solution is very unique. It begins with a hint: Fire balls can make bob-ombs explode. Right then it shows you a diversion, you need to rush to use a bob-omb to rescue the clown car. You certainly will need the clown car to reach the other side of the level.

That's when the troubles begin. You need to make the two other bob-ombs explode. But the fire can't be moved. There's a yoshi which can eat fire and then use it to throw 3 fireballs, but Yoshi is on a side of the level too far from the fire that falls from the pipe (contradiction).

The mechanic is actually funny: If you live the clown car right below the pipe, the fire ball will take control over the clown car. Did you notice they have eyes? Turns out these fireballs are alive!

Once possessed, the clown car will move towards Mario but is mostly harmless (unless you touch the fire "brain") you can jump to push the clown places. A good place is the bob-omb on the top. So that was the real use of the starman , you didn't only need it to go through the saws but also to kill the fireball and take back control of the clown car.

It's unfortunate that there are no hints that this is even possible. My big hope is that while trying to do things and jumping around it happens naturally that the fire ball possesses the clown by accident. Then they can turn that into a solution.

This doesn't solve how to explode the other bob-omb and what Yoshi's role is in all this, but I think that's enough spoilers.

Flight Day 

There's one key mechanic / puzzle to solve in this level and it is that conveyor belts allow Caped Mario / Tanoki Mario to gain momentum in a small space. To divert away from this, I put the giant spiny on top of the conveyor belt, making it seem like the belt is there just to keep the spiny in place. The koopa then needs to be used in two situations: One is free get the leaf from the question block. But we also need to kill the spiny. There are two ways to do this, both require you to really know how to throw shells.

That secures one pow. The rest of the level is about using the other traits of the cape and this extra pow to get the other pow. This one is really implementation-heavy, but I enjoyed the result so I'm sharing it.

Thanks for reading

Play my levels!