Curious Shipwreck - My First Level!

[UltimateNPC]

After following SMBX/2 for years and being a huge fan of Mario for even longer, this week I finally created my first full level! It's a little messy and it's definitely got "first attempt" energy, but I'm really proud of how it came out.

The level is quite expansive with three major sections to it, with completely optional exploration and plenty of little secrets to find for a variety of different rewards. However, if none of that interests you, you're more than welcome to skip all the exploration and go straight to the meat of the level, which is more platforming-focused!

I would say this level is about a 3/5 level of difficulty, though that's entirely down to my skill level and patience, I'm sure everybody will play it differently. That said, thank you so much to anyone who plays this and I really hope you enjoy. All feedback is welcome! I'll be including a small self-review down below in a spoiler, just to show what I've already reflected on and learned from this first experience. You don't have to read that if you don't want to, it's mainly for me, and anyone who's interested. To be clear: The reason why I didn't implement my own assessments into the level was because I wanted to maintain the feel of how I would make a first level, without overthinking every detail and constantly trying to perfect it. I'd much prefer to take what I learned and make something else out of it.

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Preview Screenshots:

Spoiler: show

Self-Assessment (Don't read until you've played the game):

Spoiler: show

The first and arguably most prominent thing I would criticise about this level is the enemy placement, as well as some of the other NPC objects. They feel a bit messy and incoherent, with some enemies only really being there as obstacles, rather than coherent parts of the level. My goal, initially, with the first section, was to create the feeling that these enemies had come running out of the shipwreck, but I couldn't really emphasise that when not one of said enemies actually appears in the ship section, nor does the outside of the ship telegraph anything to imply a great escape. What I learned from this was to be more reserved with my usages of enemies and to consider more carefully when and where I place them, and who I place in each spot. I do feel like this is handled better in the optional puzzle section and the ship section than in the first area, but it's still not perfect. In the ship section, I feel like much of the design was only there to be stylish, it doesn't create much of a cohesive experience, and as far as platforming goes, it's not the most fleshed-out. I'm not really sure how to rectify this, but I will figure it out.

The next thing I want to reflect on is the usage of space. In every section, I wanted to fill up as much of the empty space as possible, because my personal golden rule for game design is that there should never be a moment on-screen where the player has NOTHING interesting to look at at all. However, in doing so, I feel like some rather pointless design choices were made, which don't really add anything to the level, and there still ended up being a pretty big empty spot (near the first section's key) because I honestly couldn't think of anything interesting to add around there. So, from now on, I'll cut back on trying to fill space and focus on fleshing out the space that I KNOW I will use.

The way I started this level, given that I had no actual concept in mind, was to gather a bunch of items from the selection and place them all in the level space for me to use freely. The goal here was to work with what I had, and not end up adding more and more cool-looking NPCs, it was my way of exercising self-restraint, and also - while I love SMBX's style-mixing - to avoid making it look TOO messy. However, I still ended up overestimating how many items I would actually need, and ended up prioritising committing to my past self's selection rather than deleting anything that really didn't matter. For the most part, I'm happy with how many of the various NPCs were used, but I imagine to the unknown eye, it does come off quite over the top.

That said, I also understand that this level is, in of itself, a little conceptually excessive, and lacking focus. I wasn't too concerned with this when I was creating it, because my goal first and foremost was to create something that would serve as a proof of potential both to myself and to others, which is why it has a variety of little quirks and ideas. I feel like I did as good of a job as I could have done of showing off what I'm capable of at my very earliest stages of SMBX development, rather than creating one singular gimmicky level that could fit seamlessly into any non-existent episode with ease. I imagine - and hope - that my future levels would be a lot more focused, and restrained in their variety, but ultimately, as a proof of potential, I think this level works best the way that it is.

I had originally planned to include some kind of bonus ending for anyone who managed to get all three star coins - or all of those and the five dragon coins - but for one thing, the level's challenging enough as it is, for another thing, I couldn't figure out how to do events in time (this is something I sorely need to work on as soon as possible), and I also didn't want to cause FOMO when the entire point of the player experience is to play the level how you want and choose how much exploration you do purely for your own experience, especially while the optional section is actually quite challenging, if I do say so myself. The last reason why I chose not to do this is because I forgot.

I believe that's all of the notable criticisms I can give myself, though I'm sure I'll think of more later. Maybe a year or so down the line I'll reimagine this level to show how far I've come since now. Who knows? Anyway, thank you if you read all of this, if you agree or disagree with anything I said, or have anything to add in general, please feel free to say so. I hope you enjoyed my first level!

[Just_Thomas]

Ok, that's really difficult to judge. The level is kind of chaotic in terms of the graphic elements and the NPCs. The graphics have different styles (from the different games). You can do that, but it's difficult and in most cases the result is unfortunately not particularly exhilarating.
This hack for SMW proves that it can work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DNaFMYQfdw
(Super Mario Bros. 1X)

Whereby it must be said here that this is used separately for each of the levels, most of the time.
If you have already created levels for Mario Maker, you will usually be relatively limited, both in terms of the options for inserting certain elements (grass, hills, flowers etc.) and, above all, the style at the start (SMB1, SMB3, SMW, NSMB, SM3DW).
What I'm trying to say is that sometimes less is more. Just because we have so many NPCs here (base game and additional downloads) doesn't mean that you should use them all in a jumbled mess. Your level doesn't even have many enemies in it (that's a good thing), but somehow it doesn't seem homogeneous.

I didn't study level design, game of arts or art in general, but if you look at various works of art, you realize at some point that certain things like colors, objects, structures, etc. simply belong together and look like they're made of one piece. Unfortunately, I don't see that here at all.
You don't learn something like that straight away and even if you do learn it, you still get it wrong from time to time and don't see it yourself until someone points it out.

I once mixed a poisonous-green moss texture with a rather realistic rock texture for a 3D shooter (so 2 different styles of textures, imagine skyrim and fortnite for example), i.e. a texture transition. Years later I thought to myself whether I had smoked something or taken drugs that day.
I never did that again because the experience just got to me.

This is only related to the graphics. And about the gameplay: It just wasn't that cool to be killed by hammer brothers and not find the way. I can only tell you to play a few levels, either from Big N. himself (you can be sure of that) or look for well-rated levels from other users here and try to draw your own conclusions.