One of the most unexpected titles to be announced at this years E3, blurry kiosk photos notwithstanding, was Nintendos upcoming Mario Maker project. As the name suggests, its a simple dragndrop tool that lets you make your own Super Mario Bros. stages. While its not released until 2015 and were still in the dark as to how well be sharing our creations, its surprising that Nintendo have, after almost thirty years, handed over the keys to their Italian supercar. Shigeru Miyamoto and the Mario team have spoken at length about their exhaustive level design process; reams of graph paper in the 80s have given way to a modern day Mario school for employees. When you consider the thought Nintendos finest have put into the height of every pipe and the arc of every coin trail, one thing becomes clear: its going to be hard to make Mario levels that are actually fun to play. Content curations come a long way since the days of Doom, when 3000 user maps would be dumped on a CD and sold for a fiver at Dixons, but theres still going to be a lot of chaff to sift through come launch day. First-timers tend to repeat the same kinds of mistakes when designing their own game content, whether its an adventure map in Minecraft or a Sackboy torture machine in LittleBigPlanet. If youre planning on dipping your toes into the shark-infested waters of game mods or level design, there are some stumbling blocks you should definitely watch out for:
