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1 HN recommender · recommended in 5 months, 2016–2023
5:43 · 1.2M views · Jun 5, 2014
A Design Club episode that analyzes how Super Mario Bros. level 1-1 teaches players to play through level design alone, without text tutorials.
HN cites it as the standard walkthrough of Mario's implicit teaching and as an example of hiding the tutorial inside the problem.
6 comments from Hacker News
Was thinking the same thing. The Nintendo designers were always so meticulous about the design of the levels, especially what’s visible to a player at any given point. To get a sense for this, watch this video [1] (from 7 years ago) walking through the design of level 1-1 of SMB. It’s crazy what (likely) went into planning the design of each level of the various Mario platformer games. But like OP, this is strictly looking at it from a gameplay perspective, ignoring the impressive technical feet that this is. [1] this video
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
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'.
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.
Possibly the most famous video game tutorial of all time has got to be World 1-1 from the original Super Mario Bros. this video And really, most of the later Mario games execute this fairly well, with some (sunny) exceptions here and there. Nintendo is unusually skilled at introducing a new mechanic in a way that feels like organic play, and slowly ramping up the complexity in a way that will leave most players feeling like natural masters by the end of the level, without realizing that the level was leading them by the nose the entire time.