I’m way behind on hip platforming games. Braid and LittleBigPlanet will make it to my thumbs soon enough, but these days, I’m still trying to get through the backlog of big hitters from 2007. Today: Super Mario Galaxy.
What really brought the game to my attention was this talk from the game’s director, Yoshiaki Koizumi. Specifically:
“The concept was to play with Mario running around on spherical objects … Why spherical worlds… What distinctive features attracted us to spherical worlds? Was it just because they were novel?”
[Koizumi] explained that no matter how large you make the playing field, if you walk long enough you will run into a wall, and that will make you turn around, which makes the camera turn around and runs the risk of making the player lost.
With a sphere, Mario can run all he wants without falling or hitting a wall… a useful concept for getting players totally absorbed in the moment. Koizumi added that the best thing about spherical worlds is the “unity of surface,” and the “connectedness.”
Neither will the player get lost easily, or need to adjust the camera – by using spheres, Koizumi said, they had created a game field that never ended.
This became the overall theme of development – “we should tune the game so people can play without ever having to think about the camera,” Koizumi said. “Frankly, it took a very long struggle, but we finally found the direction we needed.”
It’s long struck me that separate camera controls should count as an unnecessary complexity in third person games. On occasion, I’ve put a 3D game in the hands of a non-gamer friend and watched how they struggle to coordinate movement and controlling their view point. The consistent result was an inability to navigate the space, followed very quickly by frustration and then within a few minutes they would give up. However, since I’ve never seen a game remove camera controls without reviewers throwing up their arms in protest, it seemed that removing camera controls was a desirable theory that might never be satisfactorily borne out in practice.
It was fascinating to read of Nintendo’s solution - to alter radically the structure of the world around the needs of the camera. How successfully does Super Mario Galaxy realise these ideas?
Continue reading ‘Notes on Super Mario Galaxy‘