The whole release of Grand Poo World III was one of the best things happening in the Internet last year. The chaos that broke smwcentral, how it beat Super Mario RPG in viewers on Twitch for quite a many days and how much fun every streamer seemed to have with it.
I can't get past the first jump though, but still, thank you barb!
Agreed, it was a blast to watch people tackle it. In addition to what you mentioned, I'd include Barb's Lunar Magic streams. They were super chill and it was some of my favorite content of the year, getting to watch him in his creative process working on the hack.
Barb (creator of Grand Poo World 3) is my favorite level designer and surely one of the best... But I would say peak Mario might have been the 2022 GDQ Super Mario World romhack race. Some of the stuff in that is truly mind boggling.
I made a web based level editor that I was hoping would fill in gaps I perceived in Mario Maker: https://smaghetti.com/ I no longer work on it and never really filled those gaps, but it was a fun time nonetheless.
I spent a lot of time with Super Mario Flash back in the day, has great level editor, you can share levels by copy and pasting a level definition: https://funkypotato.com/super-mario-flash/
No, and it has the single-maintainer problem (buses, lottery, etc.). The tool has a high learning curve and hidden/unexplained features that you have to read years-old forum posts to use correctly. Lunar magic is great, but there is tons of room for improvement. There has been at least one attempt to solve this problem, though progress has been slow: https://github.com/SMW-Editor/smw-editor.
I liked the idea of these games and own the 3DS game and 2 on the Switch. I like making levels, but for the most part I haven’t had a lot of fun playing other people’s levels.
I gave up on the games because it seemed like most of the user submitted content were weird non playable machines where people bend the rules of the engine to hurl Mario along to the goal automatically.
Interesting to see that, but it got to the point where I saw nothing else, and it’s been on the shelf for years.
I still maintain that the Mario Maker series could be absolutely brilliant if Nintendo would invest in better discovery algorithms and searchability. The pool is going to be flooded with garbage, and rightfully so given that kids love to play and make things too. There's nothing wrong with that, but in the end it means you've fallen into a tough situation where the internal discovery tools don't work, and the only way for a level to be "discovered" is for an influencer to find it.
I doubt you can ever build a perfect fix for this, but it could be a lot better than it is right now. Unfortunately it's just an abandoned project at this point, and the inevitable Mario Maker 3 will likely just have the same issues.
Actually people on social media sites like Twitter solve a similar discoverability issue by following interesting people. Subscribing to interesting level creators inside the game reduces the problem to finding these creators.
Same—unfortunately most of the content that other players produce is either impossible to lose or is specifically designed to be as hard as possible. You can still find levels which are suitable for your skill level, but the “10 mario mode” or whatever is specifically built around selecting the next level FOR you, so that entire game mode is basically a waste.
Kinda weird, I've found that Mario Maker 2, if you queue up on the next-to-hardest difficulty, is basically good? I've encountered plenty of "top quartile of SMW" difficulty levels.
There's some garbage in there too, but that's the game! There's definitely good sets of levels nowadays IMO.
The original inspiration was a DGR video in late 2021 when he showed the original chinese-language windows-based level viewer. That inspired me (as a Mac user) to seek out the API and level format documentation, then it was a whole load of trial and error to get the rendering working. There are more popular viewers (AFAICT) out there, but I enjoyed the challenge.
I really appreciate this work, thanks to it I was able to recover all my levels I had made for mm2 before I sold my switch years ago. I didn't have any level codes, all I had was a screenshot with one of the level names, so I had to filter the whole dataset by level name and luckily that level popped in there (I was afraid Nintendo would have deleted my stuff since my account was inactive for so long...). Then I was also able to get my uploader id from that single level record, which allowed me to filter all other levels I had made. You guys made my day :)
Mario is one my favorite platforming series, but I felt that the Mario Maker games never quite reached the level of innovation of LittleBigPlanet. (Both in the tooling and the community.)
It looks like some users did the work to archive LittleBigPlanet, too:
People came up with all kinds of hacks to push the engine to its limits. They made FPS games, top down Zelda dungeons, and all kinds of crazy stuff with LBP. It was awesome.
I haven't checked out LBP's spiritual successor Dreams yet (I don't have time to game lately), but I've heard it's phenomenal.
That said, I do enjoy watching others try to clear some of the diabolically difficult levels that Mario Maker creators design.
I looked into Dreams a while ago. Dreams is more a general game engine than a level editor, including a highly unusual rendering engine that is not based on polygons. But apparently all this innovation hasn't translated in much success.
I know Nintendo will never allow it to exist in the open but is this a way to archive the actual levels or just a list of names/codes? I'm genuinely sad thinking about the (very real) possibility of them vanishing forever.
Most likely Nintendo (being an extensive AWS user) will just ship the levels to some S3 bucket; never to see the light of day. Even if each level were just 2 MB, that would cost them only $46/mo. to keep 1 million levels.
I think pretendo kinda does this? Someone who's more familiar should probably confirm/give caveats but I believe at the very least there are tools to pull down courses + metadata, but I don't known whether a public repository has been established.
This already exists online — won't link it here but it's easy to find if you know where to search. Players have been unable to upload since March 2021, so any archive that's a year or two old will still be up-to-date.
This is so cool hope to play around with it tonight. I converted the API to a OAS/swagger file and temporarily hosted them here to play around with while the site is hugged to death https://mariomaker2api.apidocumentation.com/
I had an app on the frontpage for a whole day last year (Show HN) and the server behaved like a champ... a simple 6US/month, cloud compute instance on Vultr. It was a Rails app as well.
I generally dont understand how some sites go down so quick.
I think its a combination of A: they don't know which credentials are being used; B: While figuring it out would be somewhat trivial, it still requires effort to set up tracking for it; and C: We're not doing anything nefarious with it, challenging Nintendo's intellectual property, committing piracy, or using it to upload illegal content. As a reminder, Nintendo does not own the copyright on the courses uploaded to its servers. The creators do. By using SMM2, they grant Nintendo a non-exclusive license to use their courses in the game. Non-exclusive
https://fusoya.eludevisibility.org/lm/
Also, go check out the Grand Poo World III videos. Absolutely peak Mario.