Super Mario Bros. X Forums

I am creating my first episode and the goal is to make a mario 3 style game. How long was the typical Mario 3 level? I remember mario 3 having lots of levels but that many of the levels with just a few exceptions were very short and had no checkpoints. How does does it take to beat a typical mario 3 level assuming the player is decent and knows where to go?

They are basically like 1 to 3 or 4 Minutes long depends of obstacles on your way, hazards and secrets. You can make an SMBX Episode relative to that of course.

I remember that you needed 3 minutes (maybe even less) to beat a single level in SMB3, without trying to find secrets.

Well, you can do 4 minute levels with finding all secrets if you want. I mean, it's fun for those, who enjoy merio 3.

Super Mario Bros. 3 has extremely short levels as it doesn't support checkpoints. I believe the 3 minute estimates are too high. I'm looking at a few videos for reference and most levels take less than two minutes to get to the end (deaths excluded), including the final castle. Some take less than one minute. Most levels have only one "section" sometimes followed by a very short bit of about 2 screens where the exit is located. There truly aren't that many secrets either and nothing essential since you can't re-enter the levels. The timer gives the player roughly 4 minutes to complete a level and it's very generous.

Approximately 200 tiles wide on average if I remember.

(or that might've been SMB1; one of the two was about 160 tiles)

Vellidragon wrote:Super Mario Bros. 3 has extremely short levels as it doesn't support checkpoints. I believe the 3 minute estimates are too high. I'm looking at a few videos for reference and most levels take less than two minutes to get to the end (deaths excluded), including the final castle. Some take less than one minute. Most levels have only one "section" sometimes followed by a very short bit of about 2 screens where the exit is located. There truly aren't that many secrets either and nothing essential since you can't re-enter the levels. The timer gives the player roughly 4 minutes to complete a level and it's very generous.

Sounds the kind of levels I would want to make honestly. There is just something so very nice about being able to just sit down and actually finish a whole super mario level in just a couple of hours or less. One of the things I don't like about Doom mapping is that even though 2.5D games are WAY easier to map for than pure 3D ones it can still take easily 6-12 hours to make a single level of any reasonable size and quality.

Play the first level of the Invasion 2 (SMB3 1-1)

FallingSnow wrote:Approximately 200 tiles wide on average if I remember.

I'm not so sure if I can agree on that, honestly, but a guess is a guess. My guess is around 300 tiles, or around 1.5 minutes.

Both of those width estimates are too high, actually (300 is way too high). These levels are positively tiny. I took a random level map (no fortresses or airships) from each world and divided its width by 16 to get the level width. Every section's width in tiles is a multiple of 16 (not surprisingly, as that's one screen on the NES) and the majority are either 160 or 176 tiles wide (10 or 11 screens, respectively), including the goal area. The widest I could find is a level from world 7 that is 208 tiles (13 screens) wide. (Bowser's castle should technically be the widest if you include all sections, but it has multiple paths so the actual distance that Mario needs to move can differ and doesn't have to be longer than in other levels.)

Vellidragon wrote:Both of those width estimates are too high, actually (300 is way too high). These levels are positively tiny. I took a random level map (no fortresses or airships) from each world and divided its width by 16 to get the level width. Every section's width in tiles is a multiple of 16 (not surprisingly, as that's one screen on the NES) and the majority are either 160 or 176 tiles wide (10 or 11 screens, respectively), including the goal area. The widest I could find is a level from world 7 that is 208 tiles (13 screens) wide. (Bowser's castle should technically be the widest if you include all sections, but it has multiple paths so the actual distance that Mario needs to move can differ and doesn't have to be longer than in other levels.)

That actually sounds about right. I don't really make levels that small, under some circumstances.