Researching Super Mario Bros. Level Design | AI and Games #10

Key Takeaways

[Music] Hi everyone, I'm Tommy Thompson. This is AI and Games. Today we're going to look at the level design of Super Mario Brothers and how the core principles set out by Shigaro Myamoto and Tekashi Tazuka have been revered and evolved in subsequent games as we celebrate the 30th anniversary of Super Mario Brothers in 2015. Today, we're going to discuss not only how the Mario series continues to reuse design concepts that are familiar, but adopts new ideas that fundamentally never break the Mario formula. This video is in fact based on multiple academic papers in the analysis of level design, and we'll refer and link to them throughout should you wish to learn more about this [Music] research. The Super Mario series started in 1985 with the release of Super Mario Brothers on the Nintendo Entertainment System. The game itself introduced a number of innovations that differentiated it from previous games starring Mario, such as the original Donkey Kong, and is largely inspired from Mario Brothers, an arena- based game in which both Mario and Luigi fight off waves of enemies. The game expanded on Mario Brothers by introducing a range of power-ups, a more flexible movement and jumping mechanic, scrolling to the right of the screen to discover the game world, and much more besides. With over 290 million copies sold by 2015, the Super Mario series is not only the most successful series in video game history, but has established Mario and the core mechanics of his games as a cultural phenomenon. But like any other video game property, Mario continually needs to evolve. There's a fundamental need for video games to continue to innovate on their core concepts in order to maintain interest from fans. Of course, that's a really difficult issue to tackle, and poor Nintendo receive a lot of hassle from both the game press and indeed the more vocal online communities about how they failed to innovate on the core Mario formula. Of course, Nintendo have deviated from the original concept in many respects, having Mario prescribe drugs, develop a third dimension, ride on go-karts, hold house parties, turn into paper, and soar through galaxies. But what about Super Mario Brothers? Are the 2D games simply derivative? Are they throwing out the same thing every couple of years on different hardware? The answer obviously is no. But how that's achieved is rather fascinating. To understand how Super Mario innovates, we need to concern oursel with the idea of design patterns, a construct of game design which has a significant impact upon player experience. Design patterns appear everywhere in video games, and when good patterns are found, they are often duplicated in other games and indeed other genres. A simple example is that of coin collection in Mario, resulting in unlocking a valuable item, a pattern that's been subsequently adopted by the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog, Crash Bandicoot, and Banjo Kazouie. But in this case, we want to look at the patterns of Mario level design. research in design patterns in an academic sense has actually been conducted for some time now. However, what we're looking at is a particular body of work that was conducted by Steve Dalsk and Julian Dalius exploring the original Super Mario Brothers, acknowledging that the game adopts a group of roughly 20 patterns that are repeated throughout each level. These patterns acknowledge the placement of enemies, the grouping of environmental obstacles, and even placement of coins and power-ups in an effort to make players commit the same small but fundamentally unique gameplay actions throughout each level. In addition, each Super Mario Brothers level, when measured in terms of individual gameplay beats, in which we count a beat as a unique segment of gameplay, is roughly the same length. Note, that doesn't mean they're the same physical length, but the number of unique gameplay moments is roughly the same. Now, this analysis did not address two particular types of level, underwater and castles. This is because on a fundamental level, they actually play differently from the rest of the game. The way in which players interact with underwater levels is totally different from the rest of the game because, well, Mario's underwater. Meanwhile, castles are also different because the introduction of Bowser sending fireballs through the map as well as confronting him at the drawbridge has an impact on how that level is designed. Despite this, there is significant evidence that there is a language that expresses how Super Mario levels are designed. So, the key question is, does the same language apply to future games in the series? In order to understand what impact this design pattern language has, we need to look at each level in each game that adheres to the Super Mario Brothers formula. This spans 10 different games across the last 30 years. While there have been significantly more than that, we're only interested in games in the official Super Mario series that retain the original gameplay concepts. So firstly, we can ignore all 3D Mario games given that they are fundamentally different from the 2D games. That's right. Go beat it. Beat it. Furthermore, three of the 2D Super Mario games deviate from the original formula to the point the games are actually designed differently. Super Mario Land 3, Wario Land, and Super Mario World 2, Yoshi's Island, are 2D Mario games that don't play like the original, largely because you don't play as Mario himself. But also, we need to assess the real Super Mario Brothers 2. Here's a bit of trivia for you. The American and European release of Super Mario Brothers 2 is not actually Super Mario Brothers 2. It's a reskin of Japanese title Yumi Kojo Dockkey Panic. This is all rather ironic given that Dockkey Panic is a discarded prototype for Super Mario Brothers 2. The original Super Mario Brothers 2 was released in Japan in 1986, but it did not make it to Western Shores because Nintendo of America thought it would be too hard for American audiences. Bunch of pansies. It was eventually released in America and Europe in 1993 where it was dubbed Super Mario Brothers: The Lost Levels as part of the Super Mario Allstars on the Super Nintendo. At the time of this video, this research has only looked at the first world of each game while ignoring the underwater and castle levels. Despite this, this results in 42 different levels being analyzed across 10 games that span 27 years of Mario [Music] history. 2D Mario games continue to use the same design patterns from 30 years ago. But there are some really interesting observations when we consider the number of unique beats of gameplay in each level as well as the actual patterns adopted. Firstly, Mario levels have progressively increased in the number of beats per level and only recently began to reduce this count. Actually, the Mario Land games carry the most beats per level of all games, which is an interesting idea considering we would imagine levels for a portable device would be less dense with activity given modern habits of how we consume mobile games. Similarly, the density of how many design patterns are adopted per beat is only now beginning to increase with some really interesting applications in the New Super Mario Brothers series, which we'll talk about in a moment. Outside of beat counts, we observe other interesting facts about the use of specific design patterns. Firstly, many ideas from the original Super Mario Brothers seldom appear in later games with patterns such as the roof valley, variable gap, and the gap stair valley rarely used. Secondly, a lot of design patterns are nowadays reskinned to make them look fresh and appealing. Although it's fundamentally the same idea, this actually made some of the research quite challenging, particularly when the analysis started on the New Super Mario Brothers games. Perhaps most interesting, new patterns are always, and I mean always, inspired from existing ones. New design patterns appear in the Mario series in abundance with 25 new patterns recognized in the early phases of this research. However, what's really fascinating is that each new pattern is an innovation on an existing one. Take for example a two path, a pattern shown early on in the original Super Mario Brothers that allows the player two paths to clear a particular segment of the game. One evolution of this pattern is two path item with a well-known example in world 1 of Super Mario Brothers 3, where the Super Leaf allows Mario to fly to a separate path in the map. This same pattern is also inverted in the likes of Super Mario Land, where the player must not be carrying an item to take a particular path. Some more modern twists found in the New Super Mario Brothers games include two path hidden, where the path will only be made visible if Mario walks into it, as well as two path dead end, which forces an uncharacteristic behavior of having the player backtrack. All 25 patterns observed in subsequent games share some fundamental relationship with an original pattern from Super Mario Brothers. This tells us two things. One, that the original analysis of Super Mario Brothers is sound. But more importantly, there's a fundamental language to Mario level design that Nintendo must actually use. Whether this is explicit or not, or whether it's in fact annotated the same way that we've described it, we don't know. But it's clear that there's a core logic behind how each game innovates. Despite this, there are also some weird habits with games like Super Mario Land 2 and Super Mario World being the main culprits for creating what we call throwaway patterns. Design patterns such as the spike trap and Trench Valley that seldom appear, if ever, in other Mario games. Arguably the most exciting find from this analysis is the continued use of the silent tutorial. Level 1 of Super Mario Brothers creates an invaluable tutorial on core gameplay mechanics in its opening segment with Mario being faced with a gloomba as well as a particular brick placement and a hidden mushroom in one of the question blocks. This is actually three design patterns at once. Multiple paths establishing that Mario can either run under the brick blocks or jump onto them. In this case, this is a two- path pattern. Single enemy providing one enemy that will challenge Mario. Riskreward, the culmination of the hidden mushroom being in the same level as the gloomba. These three patterns tell us some really useful information on how to play Mario implicitly. One, you can use the jump to either a kill an enemy or b jump onto a platform to avoid being attacked and in fact c hit blocks to find items. Number two, touching a gloomba and not jumping on it will kill us, but touching a mushroom will reward us. Three, sometimes it's really worth going for the question blocks, even if enemies are nearby. This is a silent tutorial. No text is displayed, no words are said, but the player gains tremendous insight on how to play Super Mario Brothers. So, it's perhaps fitting then that the same tutorial appears in the first level of subsequent games with almost every game using the same three patterns. As we see here in world 1 one of Super Mario Brothers 3, the two path is changed to a three path with the mushroom on the top layer. Meanwhile, Super Mario World mixes up with a Koopa attacking from the top path, but the riskreward this time being a dragon coin. A trimmed down version of the same pattern appears in Super Mario Land. Fast forward over a decade later and New Super Mario Brothers on the DS uses the same old trick. We round up here at New Super Mario Brothers U repeating the same approach almost 30 years later. It might change slightly, but at the end of the day, it's always the same patterns. Two or more paths and a riskreward gamble brought about by a solitary enemy. Only Super Mario Land 2 fails to adhere to this pattern. What's fascinating is that this silent tutorial has been sitting right in front of us all this time for 30 years. The New Super Mario Brothers series is equally fascinating in that it both respects the traditions of older Mario games, but continually subverts or screws around with them for its own purposes. While many old school patterns return, new patterns emerge either to expressly challenge old ideas such as the two path hidden or two- path dead end, or old patterns are mashed together in interesting ways. This can be summed up as pattern crossover, whereby two patterns are merged together to create something that is in some sense new. The examples shown now from New Super Mario Brothers U take two patterns and merge them together to create something that is not only a new experience but is immediately relatable to anyone who has knowledge of Mario or platformers in general. In each case, one of the patterns becomes the dominant where we have a strong understanding of how to clear this particular set of patterns given we already have a lot of experience in beating the dominant one. However, the other one that's been merged into it now provides some interesting segment to kind of enhance the game play. In addition, we observe cases of pattern subversion where old patterns return but are deliberately changed to operate unlike you would expect. A simple example appears in New Super Mario Brothers 2 where we see a three horde typically shown in older games as glmbbas attacking you one after the other to now being stacked at top one another. We still have to think about the same core issue, but our means of tackling it changes to accommodate for the new approach. This leaves us with plenty of questions for future Mario level analysis. Is this silent tutorial the only one that exists? Probably not. We've already observed patterns and level types such as underground, high ground, land, etc. But whether specific patterns are used with a certain frequency at particular points in time would be interesting to discover. There's a significant body of data mining that could be conducted once this data has been annotated from across all Mario games. In addition, taking much of this knowledge and pouring it into the challenge of procedurally generating Mario levels would prove rather exciting. Can we procedurally generate Mario levels that are a reflection of specific games in the series? Can we find means to consolidate the creative spaces of these systems to reflect specific Mario games and effectively create AI systems that could build spiritual successors, if you will, to established games. There's plenty of work happening in procedural generation of Mario levels, as has already been discussed in the Mario AI competition video, but it's a topic of continued relevance today. As we wrap up, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that all of the talking points from this video are derived from actual academic research in Super Mario level design. Check out the video description for a link to numerous research papers by a variety of academics on this topic from all over the world. This video is also inspired by a paper that I presented myself at the 2015 Foundation of Digital Games Conference. If you find this research interesting, take a moment to read through these publications as they cover these topics in far greater detail. And with that, we close this video wishing Super Mario Brothers a very happy 30th birthday, and we look forward to what's coming in the future. Thanks for watching, folks. We'll see you soon. [Music] Oh yeah, Mario time.