this is my christmas present
You’ll come across lots of SMM levels featuring art created with Super Mario elements: depictions of Mario made of blocks, music stages that play a song, messages spelled out with coins. I wanted to try it out.
SMM was, in fact, a Christmas present from my wife. I wanted to do something cute for her, and so I summed all of my artistic strengths to draw a heart. Well, two hearts. And our initials. I’m not a very artistic person.
After that, I just kind of winged it to try some interesting elements. Although this level is still the default length, as my previous entry was, I was a lot more sparse here. I stuck with fairly classic Mario elements: The staircases of blocks with pits in between, stretches of pretty basic enemies, and fire-breathing piranha plants.
I love fire piranhas! They’re mildly surprising, since they pop out of pipes. They don’t take up too much space and they don’t move, so they’re easy to jump over. They fire projectiles in your direction at an angle, so you do have to react to them in surprising ways. These facets all make for an interesting, dynamic enemy that I’m probably overusing in my stages.
At one particular point, someone left me a hilarious comment/drawing to illustrate the tricky dual-piranha plant trap I set up. .
This course ended up being my most popular course. I think between the title and the hearts I accidentally signalled that this was going to be a short, kind of goofy level that wasn’t too serious or difficult. That’s the lesson, I guess. Short, goofy levels get more attention? That’s fine with me. I am not interested in every single thing I do being a masterpiece of Serious Level Design.
