Mario 64

[Anonymons No.6032869]

If Super Mario 64 was Nintendo's first 3D platformer, how did the devs know how to design the levels? was it "learn as we go", or did they hire people with prior experience in 3D levels?

[Anonymous No.6032873]

>>6032869
You mean on a technical side? They probably had people/advisors with 3D experience, but for the most part the game looks really experimental and anything-goes, so it's probable they took few or no cues from existing 3D design practices

[Anonymous No.6032883]

they spent a lot of time perfecting marios movements without levels. then they designed geometry around that. the rest is just talent and hard work. somehow they pulled it off and its still the best

[Anonymons No.6032884]

>>6032873
if they had no prior experience, that's some amazing work.

[Anonymous No.6032885]

Game devs actually had creativity back then. New genres were still being made at that time.

[Anonymous No.6032891]

The secret is a lot of prototyping and reworking, same with most big (great) games, and most successful novel software.

[Anonymous No.6032907]

The developers of Star Fox on SNES presented Nintendo a 3D game demo for platformers.

[Anonymous No.6032928]

>>6032907
This. A Yoshi game if I recall

[Anonymous No.6032931]

>>6032869
>If Super Mario 64 was Nintendo's first 3D platformer

It wasn't. The overworld sections of Mario RPG was Nintendos first 3D platformer

[Anonymous No.6032934]

https://youtu.be/-hQeArXQEJg
https://youtu.be/OmXwnQjB-Mc
https://youtu.be/I-AE0oW8jII
https://youtu.be/cRipSgxMukQ

[Anonymous No.6032950]

>>6032934
good post

[Anonymons No.6032967]

>>6032931
>Mario RPG
but anon, that was Square...

[Anonymous No.6032973]

>>6032967
Nintendo published it and drew from it. They also own most of it.

[Anonymous No.6032989]

>>6032869
They learned as they worked. Initially the game was designed to have much more linear level design and even used flagpoles to mark the goal, but then they realized that's extremely difficult to do in 3d, and the gameplay wouldn't be fun if precision platforming was major thing since players had a whole new plane of existence to think about.

[Anonymous No.6033056]

>>6032869
It was "HERE WE GOOOOOOOOOO!"

[Anonymous No.6033161]

>>6032928
Which ultimately evolved into Croc.

[Anonymous No.6033163]

hello. This is assistant director of Super Mario 64, takashi tezuka. Anything you may ask me of a work on Super Mario 64

[Anonymous No.6033169]

>>6033163
how did you do it

[Anonymous No.6033171]

>>6033163
Me on the right

[Anonymous No.6033174]

>>6033169

Mario trouble go 2D to 3D! HAHA!

2d game very very precise. Pixel perfect mario fall ledge, mario make jump. down to pixel. 3D mario programmed the same make game impossible mess.
We force programmer and team to change aspect, make mario forgiveness pixel.
Much staff did not a happy.

This good for mario 64 less problem, less bug.

Game too precise on 3d platform limit level design.
With game more forgiving, less precise, gave opportunity for staff create interesting level.

[Anonymous No.6033178]

>>6033163
>Kuroda
I love her so much, and I miss her.

[Anonymous No.6033205]

>>6032931
Isometric isn't 3D.

[Anonymons No.6033225]

>>6033163
what's your favorite Gyuudon no mise?

[Anonymous No.6033384]

>>6032884
Someone has to be the maverick in a new field. Just do something you think will work well, have a few guys try it, then go from there.

[Anonymous No.6033424]

Wasn't Mario 64 more or less designed about having an action for every button combination? I could see nintendo starting there and creating levels just based on what the player can do.

[Anonymous No.6033863]

>>6033161
And that sucked.

[Anonymous No.6034062]

>>6033163
本当に日本人じゃないでしょう :p
Any recommendations for lesser known, good rom hacks? In case anyone reading this doesn't know, Star Road feels the most like a sequel to the original game, so it's my favorite
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND7wkucyWQk
SM64 Land came out recently, and its also really impressive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1817Xer5ZM

[Anonymous No.6034320]

>>6032869
>If Super Mario 64 was Nintendo's first 3D platformer, how did the devs know how to design the levels? was it "learn as we go", or did they hire people with prior experience in 3D levels?

It's been told in several interviews:

>In earlier Mario games, we were able to measure the number of pixels Mario could jump and know exactly what was possible. But this time, we had to design the levels so that as long as your jump was “close enough”, you’d make it; it was too hard for the player to judge. This was a design change we made in the middle of the development, when the game was far already very complete. There was a lot of booing from the staff.

>Miyamoto: Well, in the beginning… we were working on something really simple—deceptively simple, even, from the perspective of the team that would go on to finish the huge, final game. (laughs) There was a room made of simple lego-like blocks, and Mario and Luigi could run around in there, climb slopes, jump around, etc. We were trying to get the controls right with an analogue 3D stick, and once that felt smooth, we knew we were halfway there. And so, along the way, we realized wanted to create a slightly larger area for them to move around in…

[Anonymous No.6034324]

>>6034320


Miyamoto: Well, that’s how it is with all our developments. (laughs) For this game things were especially vague in the beginning, because we developed it in tandem with the N64 hardware, and we didn’t know exactly how powerful the hardware would turn out to be. That’s why, at the very beginning, we actually did our work on a large, powerful computer that simulated what we guessed the N64 hardware specs would be… then, well, we got things to a point where the controls were nice and responsive, and we thought this could be the foundation for a game. But the problem was, it had all been made on this massive computer that cost tens of thousands of dollars. No one yet believed that we’d be able to make something like this on a little 250$ machine like the N64. (laughs)

>However, once the N64 prototype was finished and delivered to us, we saw that it handled the movement and controls almost perfectly. That was the moment we first realized this was going to work, so we quickly dashed off a planning spec sheet for the game. When the staff saw how long it was, they said they’d been lied to—no one told them they would have to make this massive game!

>Miyamoto: It was kind of like sculpting a diorama out of clay. First you make a very general shape. For example, with the King Bob-omb’s stage, for our initial, general design we’d have that river in the middle of the map, which you cross to reach the boss area, which is atop a big hill that you have to wind round and round as you ascend it. But say we put Mario in that map, and moving him around, we realize the river flows too fast and it sweeps him away (laughs), and that’s too hard for players, so we swap that river out for a desert valley, like Death Valley. So the form remains the same, but we gradually add more and more ideas, changing the map as we go.

[Anonymous No.6034326]

>>6034324

>It started way before there was any hardware, it started on these Onyx emulators, the old SGI Onyx. They had an N64 emulator, the first thing we got from SGI. It was an emulation of the API, not the hardware. At that time, Nishida-san – main programmer who started the entire project off – he was working on a GL and this emulator.
>The emulator was quite close to the GL, so he had these little Mario characters running around on the Onyx, or API Indys later.

>Usually that’s the first thing to go in, some kind of map system where the characters can figure out what height they are, the camera can figure out what it can see and how much it can see, figure out how to split up the scenery so it only draws as much as it needs to draw. That was the first thing, we were just playing around with Mario. He was wandering around a simple grid to start with, just picking stuff up, dropping stuff.

>Quite a few months were spent around just playing around with different camera views, animations, ways of looking at the map. At some point, the game had a fixed path, almost like an isometric type of look. That didn’t represent that much of a jump from the original 2D Mario.

>At that time, NCL hadn’t done a 3D game before, so no-one really knew what they were doing, to be honest. The artists didn’t really know how they should turn their Softimage objects into objects into the game. There was a lot of experimenting, a lot of improvisation going on. It was quite difficult to pinpoint when, where and how much Mario came into being.

Sources:
http://shmuplations.com/mario64/
http://pixelatron.com/blog/the-making-of-super-mario-64-full-giles-goddard-interview-ngc/

[Anonymous No.6034337]

>>6034324
>However, once the N64 prototype was finished and delivered to us, we saw that it handled the movement and controls almost perfectly. That was the moment we first realized this was going to work, so we quickly dashed off a planning spec sheet for the game. When the staff saw how long it was, they said they’d been lied to—no one told them they would have to make this massive game!

[Anonymous No.6034362]

>>6034326
>Miyamoto: Game developers are starting to have a lot of pretensions with 3D. It used to be, in the past, people would ask me “Making games is a lot like making movies, isn’t it?” And I’d always respond, “Yeah, it kind of is. It’s a similar process.” Then they’d ask me, “So, do you want to make movies then?” And I’d always reply in the negative, that no, we don’t want to make movies—because we’re making games.
>But lately, everyone making games seems to aspire to be some kind of movie director! Part of me is like, what the hell, do you all have some inferiority complex about movies?!
Based Miyamoto.

[Anonymous No.6034406]

>>6034362
Funny how John Carmack has said almost the same thing:
>Unlike many people in the games industry, I have absolutely zero desire to be making movies that go on the computer. And that’s the downfall of a lot of companies. A lot of game designers wish they were directors, but I think you should make up your mind.

[Anonymous No.6034649]

>>6034362
>>6034406
Is it the shift away from arcade games that led to all of this quasi-cinematic stuff? Seems that in days of yore you would come up with (for lack of a better term) a gameplay “gimmick” and build the game around that, rather than just pushing buttons to advance a plot.

[Anonymous No.6034659]

>>6032869
They stole it all front Argonaut.

[Anonymous No.6034661]

>>6034320
All that text just to say what we already knew, that the n64 was a mario64 machine.

[Anonymous No.6034676]

>>6034661
What

[Anonymous No.6034691]

>>6034676
They designed the console around it then called it a day. Have to hand it to them they were under a ton of pressure and almost killed themselves on Oot afterward.

[Anonymous No.6034696]

>>6034691
Then we didn't read the same thing. They started experimenting on a emulator and then tried to see if the game worked ok in real hardware. The N64 already existed before Mario.

[Anonymous No.6034721]

>>6034696
My bad then anon.

[Anonymous No.6034730]

>>6034676
>>6034691
>>6034696
>>6034721
I think he means how designing Mario 64 influenced the design of the controller. Under Shiggy's guidance Mario 64 and the controller were designed almost for each other, in tandem.

[Anonymous No.6034814]

>>6034730
They weren't

[Anonymous No.6034835]

>>6034730
Argonaut gave them the keys to legacy polygonal gaming then Shiggy talked up the press like he invented them but anon is obviously too invested to actually argue with here

[Anonymous No.6035529]

>>6034649
To a point, though I think some story around a game is fine. RPGs would lean rather heavy on story even in the late 80s, and that likely comes from how a game master for a pen and paper game is supposed to drive a story and plot, with his players acting out their characters in said story (results may vary, mind), and point and click adventures, on top of outright text adventures, would focus a lot on story even in the 80s as well.

The iD Software guys were big into D&D, they played it a lot during the development of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, and Doom, as well as earlier stuff back when they worked at SoftDisk, you can see influences here and there, guys like Sandy Petersen (who actually joined late in Doom's development) were big time pen and paper nerds. Aside from writing for Dragon and publishing his own pen and paper RPGs, you can insinuate that a lot of his level making methodology came from building them like he would a dungeon crawl, complete with traps and treasures.
John Carmack has been quoted as saying that story in a game is expected to be there, but isn't that important, and I think for games like Doom and Quake, that's a fine approach, however there's very much kinds of games where focusing some more on story is suitable, as long as one doesn't forget that games still need to be games. A game like Diablo has a pretty straightforward story which doesn't tell all that much which is riveting, but it's kinda just there being told to you in brief pauses in gameplay (which you can skip even), but it's less there because the devs think they have this amazing narrative like a good movie, it's more just flavoring and set dressing for the quests and exploits you get down to, like who is X or Y monster and why you should kill him, and what's up with this or that special dungeon.

[Anonymous No.6035540]

You could make a game based primarily around narrative, and it could be good, but I think it's pretty difficult to do that really well (most 80s text adventures were below dimestore novel tier, mind).
Of games which are focused primarily on telling a story and nothing else, Phantasmagoria 2 and Fate/Stay Night are about the only ones which have clicked with me, and I'll say that they aren't exactly literary or storytelling masterpieces.
Planescape Torment is supposed to be really good (haven't played it), but that still has gameplay, it's just you have the ability to talk your way out of every single possible violent encounter without fighting, should you want to, I understand it's a very wordy game.

There's definitely people who wish they were directing movies though, such as David Cage, and you can really tell by looking at their games why they are not directing movies.

[Anonymous No.6035668]

>>6032883
where can I get this pdf

[Anonymous No.6035694]

>>6032869
unlike Sega at the time, they actually knew how to make fun games, so they just extrapolated that to 3d.

Segas answer was a rail flying game with 7 levels total.

[Anonymous No.6035891]

>>6034835
Can you link something which describes this in detail?

[Anonymous No.6036017]

>>6032883
I love these dioramas

[Anonymous No.6036369]

>>6035668
idk, but heres another scan
>>6036017

[Anonymous No.6036413]

>>6036369
dire dire docks is the worst course in sm64

[Anonymous No.6038215]

>>6032973
>They also own most of it.
>still have to ask S-E for right for Geno and Mallow for just Smash
um no