In my map, I designed it to slowly ween the player into the core mechanics of the game, which is just adventure based, and very block dependent instead of enemy based.
Conflict: Try to escape the dungeon of your own mind.
Twist: Blocks are not as they seem at first.
Where: Inside your mind, you had a comma so it's very blank and empty at first.
Time: Unknown
Architecture: Blocks
What happened before: Your mind was peaceful, full of adventure and color.
How did the player get here: They are in a comma, it will be revealed over time.
Here is a playthrough of Super Mario World, world 1-1 followed by a map analysis of the level.
When the player first starts the level, once they walk a small distance, they see a fruit, which they cant do anything with and a red koopa shell. If the player just walks into the shell, it will be propelled forward. If the player was running, they pick up the shell and have an opportunity to gain a one up by throwing it at the line of koopas on the above cliff. If the player is not experienced yet, the player does not have to face the enemies yet, the player can just walk right by to the next screen.
The player is first presented with three blocks, one being invisible, both blocks have coins, and the invisible one cant be hit until later unlocked, which will then provide a mushroom. Now that the player most likely has figured out how to jump, another platform is introduced to show the world has multiple tiers. The next two items have a coin and a yoshi in them respectively. The yoshi allows the player to eat fruit as long as the player is running. There is a few coins floating in the air, one is a dragon coin, by placing the dragon coin in this fashion to make the players want to grab it, collecting five of these reward the player with a one up. The player will eventually come up to a koopa shell with a little koopa crawling towards it, if the player runs to the shell they are able to kick it into the koopas face, killing it. If the koopa gets to the shell first, the koopa puts the shell back on, showing the players that koopas can regain their armor.
Another shell-less koopa is on this screen, hopefully showing the player the other outcome of the situation that they haven't seen yet. If the player hits the shell, the shell will ricochet off the wall, showing the player it's a projectile to watch out for also. At the top of the hill is a football Chuck, who will chase the player, showing the player that not all enemies will die easily.
If the player decides to run away from Chuck, and jump off the hill, they're rewarded with a dragon coin. There is a tip block telling the player that if they die, they will start the level from the gate. The player has a chance at getting another yoshi incase they lost theirs, or died, if they managed to keep their yoshi alive, they're rewarded with a one up, which lets the players know that yoshi is important, keep him and good things will happen. Further down the path patches of the hill will move and a monty mole will pop out while the player is nearby. These enemies are fast by slide along the ground, the player learns that they can out maneuver enemies even if they cant out run them.
The player sees two new blocks, one will crumble momentarily, the other will sprout a vine, rewarding the player with coins and a dragon coin for their effort. Once the player jumps down, they will reach their final dragon coin, gaining a one up. There is a pit that kills the player if they fall into it, this teachers the player that you cant always just run off the cliffs without jumping. There is a odd colored pipe, which allows the player to go down into a cave and have a chance at a one up. The player must run into a block and then jump and throw the block to get the one up, this teaches the player that they can not only throw blocks, but they can throw them upwards as well.
The final screen of the level, there is one new enimy, the pirana plant. This enemy rises and lowers into the warp pipe, this shows the player be careful of some pipes or they might die. Up top there are a bunch of blocks, and a pow button that once hit, makes all coins into platforms. Since the player knows that hitting those blocks makes them disappear temporarily, they hit it and then can safely run above the football Chuck and to the finish line.
Last night I was sketching a bunch of silottes for fun, here's an interesting one. I think it could be a garbage collector in the future if fleshed out.
In my programming class, we're doing Python scripting for our last project. I had to brainstorm the following ideas to make a script for...
1. Julienne tool, also known as a Dicer. Within Modo there is a tool called the Julienne tool. It slices a mesh evenly across the whole mesh in 'strips'.
2. Vertex mover. This tool would move select vertices set intervals and would have the ability to move the vertex in any direction for any multiple between 1-10.
3. Staircase creator. This tool would create a staircase primitive similar to the one within 3D Studio Max. I would have a parameter to allow any amount of steps, the height of the steps, and the curvature of the steps.
4. Circularize tool. In a free program called VoidWorld, there's a tool called the Circularize tool. This tool takes any selection of vertices or edges and then arranges them into a circle.
5. Pattern select. One thing maya really lacks is a pattern select tool. In programs like Modo, you can select two faces, and then use the arrow keys to select the next face in the pattern.
6. Random card rotator. I love using alpha cards in my scenes, but I hate rotating them. A tool that would randomly rotate all unselected objects would be a real time saver.
7. Ambient occlusion maker. This one's mostly for pure laziness rather than being a nice tool to add to my tool-belt. In programs like Modo, I can easily achieve an AO render within 30 seconds of opening a new scene to test out my form. In Maya, I have to go through the hypershade and each node to get my desired results. If I made this tool, I'd throw in three versions, each would create and assign an ambient occlusion shader to the whole scene and then render it at 1920x1080 and then revert the whole scene back to the original lambert material and delete the created shader. Each version would simply have lower rays to be cast, essentially a preview render, a good render, and a final render.
8. Duplicate edge deleter. Sometimes a tool fails, or some user error occurs, either way, I don't know what causes an edge to be on top of another edge, but it happens sometimes. For this tool I would make a macro that would split all vertices, then extract all faces, rejoin, then merge everything back together based on the meshes overall size in the scene.
9. Color tool. Another useless tool, but I like colors, so oh well. For this tool I'd make 2 sets of 6 buttons, each set would have 6 colors and have either a white or a black wireframe. I would make the colors starting with a hue of 0° going up 60° until reaching 300°. Once again, it's useless, but I like to change colors semi frequently to give my eyes a break.
10. Duplicate along curve. Maya doesn't have any way to duplicate meshes along curves. For this script I would allow the user to chose an amount of the object, then I would tell it to align all those objects to a curve.
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