开发者谈从《超级马里奥制造》中得到的关卡设计启示

原作者：Josh Bycer 译者：Vivian Xue

今年（2015年）9月发行的《超级马里奥制造》（Super Mario Maker）是一款可玩性很高的游戏，我花了大把时间创作关卡。大多数非程序员玩家，包括我在内对于这样一个关卡编辑器已经期待了很长时间了，很多人都加入了关卡制作潮流中。在深入研究这个编辑器，并试玩了一些玩家上传的关卡后，我迫切想要分享我从中领悟到的重要游戏设计原则，并且任天堂深谙这些原则多年了。

简单介绍：

《超级马里奥制造》拥有直观的界面设计，上手极为容易。玩家可以将道具、角色和元素轻松拖拽到界面上，它们将按照经典的方式运动起来。玩家可以通过编辑器快速创造一个关卡，安插敌人，一边测试一边修改关卡。

你可以按照经典的马里奥游戏一样安排元素，也可以通过组合角色和元素创造出独一无二的事物，因此玩家们创作出来的关卡各不相同。不过为了保证关卡的质量，所有玩家在上传关卡前必须自己通关一次。

这一点似乎没什么大不了的，但事实上它为我带来了第一条启示，也是这些年来我逐渐意识到的一件很重要的事。

1. 困难不等于伟大

过去的五、六年里，市场上出现了一大批高难度的游戏：《超级肉食男孩》、《恶魔之魂》、《超越光速》等等。许多玩家将这些游戏奉为神作，它们带我们回到那个身心俱虐的经典游戏时代。这也导致很多人将难度视为评判游戏好坏的唯一标准，并且鄙视任何批评者。

然而，《超级马里奥制造》有力地反驳了这些人的观点。我能够在30分钟内设计出一个全世界只有0.001%的人能通过的关卡，我自己通关都要花点时间。

编辑器中的辅助线展示了马里奥的跳跃的确切高度和距离，你可以利用它设置跳跃障碍，还能通过设置屏幕外的陷阱杀死玩家。

你可以制造出如此难的关卡以至于想通关，除非你知道所有陷阱在哪（即你是这个关卡的设计者），或者花上大把时间试错，直到掌握正确的通关姿势。

这具有挑战性吗？当然。这会不会是硬核精英们做的事呢？是的。但这是一件令人愉悦的事吗？答案是否定的。如今《超级马里奥制造》里有很多这样充满了死亡陷阱的关卡，甚至比任天堂去年E3上举办的世界锦标赛还难。

然而，玩一个超高难度且没有任何奖励的关卡一点也不有趣，它就好比拿头撞墙，要么墙破了要么你的头破了。一名故意设计出难倒玩家关卡的开发者显然缺乏对游戏平衡的理解。很多《超级马里奥制造》关卡都存在一个问题，人们故意设置无形的障碍，让第一次尝试的玩家马上挂掉；这是一种非常低级的伎俩，并且对于玩家理解关卡完全没有帮助。

《恶魔之魂》和《超级肉食男孩》这类游戏之所以伟大，不仅是因为它们的难度，更在于它们的玩法重视技巧以及难度上的平衡。《恶魔之魂》有永久解锁/升级装备的捷径，而《超级食肉男孩》的关卡长度适中，从不会让玩家在反复尝试中感到痛苦。

我知道你现在在想什么，“那么简单的关卡更好，对吧？”与极端困难的游戏一样，太轻松的关卡也会毁了游戏。

2. 令玩家沉浸的设计

太难的游戏让玩家受挫，导致玩家流失，但太容易的游戏也有问题。我们都享受通关带来的成就感，但如果通关过程不费吹灰之力，玩家的感受将截然相反。当关卡为了讨好玩家而变得简单，玩家会感到一无所获，觉得这个游戏在浪费时间。

另外一个造成此问题的原因是，关卡的元素安排存在漏洞。记住，为高级玩家留下可寻的捷径，使他们能避开或者减轻挑战，这和留下漏洞，使玩家轻而易举地避开几乎所有机关是截然不同的。

对玩家来说，这看似是一种奖励，但你所做的一切使通关过分轻松。我看到很多《超级马里奥制造》关卡的创作者，他们精心设计了一些陷阱或障碍，但却疏于考虑某样道具或马里奥的跳跃能力，因而留下了巨大的漏洞，导致玩家可以直接跳过整个部分。

这听起来可能有点哲学化，一个优秀的关卡应该使玩家在通关后从某种程度上获得成长，可能是得到了新力量、提高了技能，甚至是获得某个成就。

关键在于不要让玩家感到他们在浪费时间，产生这种感觉的原因可能是：关卡太难，他们再也不会用到其中的技巧；关卡太简单，像在处理枯燥的工作；或者挑战的重复率太高。

下面这条启示综合了这些观点，道出了设计的真谛。

3. 伟大的设计在于和谐

作为一名游戏开发者，最难的也许不是如何平衡难度，而是如何设计关卡。在设计时，我们很容易把想法统统塞进关卡里，这个问题不仅在《超级马里奥制造》中存在，很多开发者都秉持一种游戏元素越多越好的观点。

我通过与游戏开发者交流以及创作马里奥关卡得到的一条重要经验是，一款伟大的游戏应该像一台高效运转的机器，其中的每一个元素都有各自的功能。一个优秀的例子是《超级马里奥兄弟》(Super Mario Bros World)关卡1-1，你可以观察他们是如何设计出一个不需要教程也能通过所有机关的关卡。和谐统一的原则在关卡/游戏设计中起到了关键作用。

你的游戏有水下地图吗？需要跳跃火焰？通过炮弹射击敌人？和设计一个完整游戏一样，在设计关卡前你应该先确定主题，再基于它发散创意。如果你的关卡关于复杂的机关，那么半路出现一群敌人或一个水下部分没什么意义。

很多《超级马里奥制造》关卡存在的问题是，设计者随意地把敌人安置在平台上，或者让敌人毫无预兆地突然攻击玩家。虽然这能制造一种意料之外的效果，但它与你剩下的设计相冲突，使关卡看上去像是硬拼凑起来的。

最好的游戏实现了玩法、设计和美学的统一。

这一点是任天堂在过去几十年来致力于完善的，尤其是在马里奥系列游戏中。

马里奥游戏每个阶段都有特殊玩法，哪怕出现了相同的机制或障碍，它们也会以一种不同的方式呈现以避免重复。

任天堂最好的两款游戏是《超级马里奥银河1》和《超级马里奥银河2》，这两款游戏均设计精良，内容的变化和延展令人赞叹。

最后这点是每个开发者都遇到过的问题。

4. 何时结束关卡

在确定了主题和机制后，你需要决定关卡的长度。每个机制和系统吸引玩家的时间是有限的，你应利用好这段时间。优秀的关卡设计师不会耗光玩家的兴趣。

游戏的机制越独特、小众，它们吸引玩家的总时间就越短。这是因为使用复杂或不同的机制创作关卡需要花费更多时间精力，独特的机制还会限制你创作有趣任务的方式。

《传送门》（Portal）就是一个很好的例子，该游戏的机制之一传送枪（portal gun）听起来似乎有着无限的用处，但事实上并不，它只有几种操作形式：打开机关、控制角色移动、挪动物品。

这也是为什么尽管《传送门》这个概念如此独特，游戏长度却只有几小时。《传送门2》可以说和前作半斤八两，不过它增加了一个新机制——凝胶(gel)，既要用到传送枪机制，又要区别于前作以体现创新性是很困难的。Valve本可以继续利用相同的机制和概念，创作类似的谜题来延长游戏的生命周期，但这会使游戏重复率变高，不利于《传送门》系列实现长远发展。

这也是为什么很多简单的休闲游戏有成百上千的关卡，它们通过在这些关卡内循环利用机制，使关卡与关卡间具有微小的差异，从而让玩家不断玩下去。

尽管如此，如果差异过小，你仍然会面临重复率高的问题。

回到马里奥游戏，马里奥关卡设计的妙处在于它们从来不会耗尽玩家的兴趣，这归功于任天堂对节奏的把控。

比如《超级马里奥银河》，每一关只有几分钟，刚好足够展示它的独特设计或场景，接着进入下一关，重复或是延伸它。我们经常看到很多开发者为了延长游戏而重复内容，最终却破坏了游戏质量。对于很多玩家来说，他们更希望玩一小时精彩的游戏，而不是三个小时还凑合的游戏。

《超级食肉男孩》又可以作为一个正面例子。它完全可以重复机制来延长关卡，但开发者采取了尽可能简洁直接的设计——挂掉后立即回到起点，通关后马上进入下一关，一切都在眨眼之间。这是因为设计团队知道他们的玩法无法像马里奥一样有太多变化和延伸。

如果你能为关卡创造变体，那就使用它们，但千万不要为了延长游戏而重复内容。一名优秀的设计师懂得如何让事物达到极致然后结束它。很多《超级马里奥制造》关卡中充斥着过量的复杂困难的挑战，让玩家感到游戏永远不会结束，有的关卡长度达到了正常关卡长度的三倍。正确地安排游戏的节奏是让玩家沉浸的关键，如果你在一个关卡里设置了太多不同的挑战，那么把它分成几个关卡

以上四点似乎听起来很简单，但世界各地的开发者们仍然做不好其中某个甚至多个方面。这就是任天堂与普通开发商的区别，也是我一直以来喜爱他们的原因。

30年的卓越：

很多人会批评任天堂太过依赖品牌、缺乏创新，但我觉得并非如此。通过在《超级马里奥制造》中试玩和设计关卡，我领略到了任天堂在游戏制作上的工匠精神。我觉得任天堂的马里奥系列游戏是一种艺术品，值得我们学习和研究。

《超级马里奥制造》最大的贡献是为非程序员提供了一个学习游戏设计的工具。

我在《超级马里奥制造》设计的关卡中，最受欢迎的不是那些最难或最长的关卡，而是基于以上经验制造的关卡。

事实上，我设计的关卡里最受欢迎的甚至不是平台游戏，而是一个关于解决数学问题的游戏。

伟大的游戏设计使玩家一眼就能明白元素的运作方式，但却很难用语言描述它。以上这些经验不仅为你设计自己的关卡打下了良好的基础，也有助于你思考整个游戏开发过程。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Super Mario Maker has been a fascinating game to “play” since its release in September, and I say “play” because I spent the majority of my time building levels. It’s been a long time for non programmers to have access to an editor designed for them and along with myself; a lot of people are jumping on the making bandwagon. As I dug deeper into the editor and the offerings put out, I came to realize and reaffirm some important elements about game design that were too good not to talk about further, and something that Nintendo has known about for years.

Building Basics:

Jumping into Mario Maker is incredibly easy, thanks to the visual design implemented by Nintendo. Items, characters and elements can be simply dragged and dropped and they perform exactly how they would in other Mario games. The toolset allows for someone to quickly put a level together, fill it with enemies and constantly iterate as they go.

You can also combine characters and elements to create things that are original to Mario Maker, but still retain the same elements as the previous games. This has led to the sheer variety of levels, from game developers to students and everyone in between. One of the more understated elements of Mario Maker is the simple quality control that Nintendo has built into it: All levels must be completed by their creator before uploading.

Now, that doesn’t sound like a huge deal, but it’s actually very important to the first lesson and something that I’ve come to realize over the years.

1. Difficulty Doesn’t Equal Greatness:

Over the last five or six years, there has been a real surge of challenging games on the market: Super Meat Boy, Demon’s Souls, FTL and so on. Many gamers have proclaimed this as great and a throwback to the days of classic games that were meant to be brutally difficult. This has led to fans judging a game’s quality simply on the difficulty of the title and looking down on anyone who criticizes.

With that said however, Mario Maker is a great example that contradicts that sentiment. In 30 minutes, I could design a level so difficult that .001% of the entire audience in the world would be able to beat it and it would still take me awhile to actually beat it so that I could host it.

Thanks to the analytics in Mario Maker, you can see the exact height and distance of Mario’s jumping ability and from there you could build pixel exact challenges and leaps; along with setting up off screen traps to kill the player.

The level would be so difficult that the only way you would win it would be if you knew where all the traps were (aka be the developer) or spend a lot of time dying and failing until you get it right.

Would this be challenging? Yes. Would this be something for the hardcore elite? Yes. But would this be something enjoyable? The answer to that is no. There are plenty of levels like that in Super Mario Maker now; full of death traps and situations beyond even the levels featured at the Nintendo World Tournament from E3 last year.

However, it’s not interesting to play a level explicitly designed to be over the top difficult with nothing to compensate for it. Instead of exploring a level’s design to figure it out, you’re just banging your head against the wall until either you or it breaks. When a game or level feels like the product of a developer going overboard with difficulty for the sake of being difficult, it shows a lack of understanding of game balance. One common annoyance I see in Mario Maker levels is people setting up invisible blocks purposely to cause someone to die on their first try through a level; it’s a cheap trick that offers no understanding or growth from the player’s end.

Games like Demon’s Souls and Super Meat Boy were great aside from their difficulty; both featured skill rewarding gameplay and were balanced in their difficulty. Demon’s Souls had permanent shortcuts to unlock and upgrading gear while Super Meat Boy levels were never long enough to turn into ordeals.

Now I know what you’re thinking, “Then easy levels are better, right?” While extreme difficulty can ruin a game, so can extreme easiness.

2. Engaging the Player with the Design:

Games that are too difficult feel frustrating to play and turn people off, but games that are too easy have their own problems. We all like to feel great by beating a level or a game, but not when it’s metaphorically handed to us on a silver platter. When the level is simply set up to be patronizing and offers nothing to the player, then it feels like a waste of time.

Another part of this is not locking down the elements of your level and leaving holes that can break it. There’s a huge difference between having a short cut for expert players to avoid or mitigate a challenge, and leaving a part of your level open that allows someone to simply avoid almost everything you built and head straight to the goal.

It may seem like a reward to the player, but all you’re doing is rendering your entire level moot in favor of an easy win. One thing I see with some Mario Maker levels is that the creator makes some elaborate trap or obstacle, but leaves some massive hole either due to an item or Mario’s jumping ability that makes the entire section skippable.

This is where things get a little philosophical; a good level should make the player grow by the end of it in some way. They should be different than they were at the beginning; this could mean getting new powers, improving their skill or even just getting an achievement.

The point is that the player should feel that they didn’t just waste their time, and this could be any number of feelings: The level was too hard that they’ll never use those skills again, the level was too easy that it felt like busy work, the level was a repeat of a previous challenge and so on.

Our next lesson brings these points together for one of the hallmarks of a great game designer.

3. There’s Harmony in Great Design:

Perhaps the hardest thing to come up with as a game developer even beyond balancing difficulty is deciding just what your level will be about. It’s very easy when it comes to designing something to just throw everything that you can think of into a level or game. We see this not just in Mario Maker, but with game developers who go overboard thinking that more is better.

One of the big lessons I’ve learned from talking to game developers and doing work in Mario Maker is that a great stage (or game) should be a well oiled machine; every element should have a function. A very, very big case in point would have to be Super Mario Bros World 1-1 and how the team created a level that went through all the basics of the gameplay without needing one tutorial. This is where the concept of having harmony or a unified theme comes in for what your game/level in about.

Are you making an underwater obstacle course? Jumping through fire? Dealing with enemies via shells? Just like with a full game, you need to come up with the foundation of your level and have everything flow from there. If your level is about tricky platforming, throwing in a bunch of enemies or an underwater section at the halfway point won’t make sense.

One of the more common types of levels in Mario Maker are those that just throw enemies randomly around the stage or leaves an enemy in such a way that they act as a surprise attack. While that may be unexpected, it clashes with the rest of the challenges that you have designed and makes the level seem stitched together.

This is a point that Nintendo has perfected over the last few decades, especially with the Mario titles.

Each stage in a Mario Game offers some unique take on the gameplay and if there are any repeated game mechanics or obstacles, they will be used in a different way to keep things from being repetitive.

Two of the finest games from Nintendo would be Mario Galaxy 1 and 2; both featured amazing design that kept on changing and growing over the length of play.

For our final point, we come to one area that every game designer has trouble with.

4. Knowing When to End:

Building off of the last point, once you have the foundation and mechanics down, you need to know just how much you can get out of them. Every mechanic and game system has a limited span that they will keep the player’s interest and that you as a designer can make use of. Some of the best levels and games for that matter don’t outwear their welcome.

The more unique or niche your game mechanics or challenge are, the less overall time that you can get out of them. The reason is that games with complex or different mechanics require a lot more work to create challenges suitable to them, and the unique mechanic also limits the number of ways you can create interesting challenges.

Portal is a perfect example of this. The portal gun is one of those mechanics that sounds like it has an unlimited number of uses for stage design, except it really doesn’t. If you look at the forms of manipulation, you only have a few mechanics that make use of the portal gun: Interacting with objects, controlling the player’s momentum and moving the player or objects around.

This is why despite how original Portal was, the game was only a few hours long and the same could be said for Portal 2′s campaign, but it had added mechanics in the form of the gels. Creating a challenge that not only makes use of the portal gun, but is different enough from previous stages to warrant its creation is very difficult. It would have been very easy for Valve to just keep creating puzzles and repeating concepts and mechanics to extend the life of the game, but that would have made things very repetitive and hurt Portal’s success in the long run.

This is also why we see many casual or games with straightforward gameplay have tons of levels to them, because the mechanics can be translated to a wide variety of situations with minute differences to keep things going.

With that said, if the differences are too small, then you once again run into problems of repetitive gameplay.

Taking this back to Mario, one of the best things about Mario level design is that the stages never overstay their welcome; this is due to the pacing and implementation on Nintendo’s part.

With Super Mario Galaxy, each stage is only a few minutes long and is just enough to showcase the level’s unique design or situation before they would have to repeat it or try to extend it. Too often we see developers pad out a game with recycled content and all it does is hurt the game as a whole; for many people it’s better to have an amazing one hour of play as opposed to three just okay hours.

Super Meat Boy once again can be used as an example here with its level design. Each level could have been stretched out repeating the same mechanics present to offer longer challenges, but the developers instead went for as straightforward of an execution as possible. In this way, you’re in, you’re out and you move on to the next challenge in the blink of an eye, this is because Team Meat knew that their gameplay could not be stretched out and be as varied and as long as the levels in any Mario game.

If you have variations of the design or challenge to use, then use them, but don’t repeat the same situations simply to make your level or game bigger. As we talked about with harmony in game design, a good game designer knows when they’ve taken things to their limit and ends it. Another knock against some Mario Maker levels is being overloaded with difficult and different sections, to the point where the level feels like it’s never ending; where you have one very long level that could have easily been three regular sized levels. Proper pacing is vital to keep someone engaged for the long haul and if you have too many different challenges in one level, then break it up into multiple levels if the design warrants it.

These four points may sound simple to everyone reading it, but game developers around the world still struggle with one or multiple of them and it’s what distinguishes an amazing game developer and why I still love Nintendo.

30 Years of Excellence:
It’s common for people to criticize Nintendo when it comes to their reliance on branding and saying that they never innovate, but that can’t be further from the truth. Playing and designing stages in Mario Maker has given me a real appreciation for the craftsmanship that Nintendo puts into their games. For me personally, the design that Nintendo uses in their Mario games is a work of art and something that should be studied.

As I created levels in Super Mario Maker, the ones that were the most popular weren’t the hardest or the longest, but levels built around the lessons I talked about.

In fact, my most popular level doesn’t even involve platforming, but a level built around solving math problems.

Great game design is one of those elements that we all know it when we see it, but actually describing how it works can be difficult. These lessons should give you a great foundation into building not only your own levels, but thinking about game development as a whole.(source：Gamasutra.com)