Super Mario Bros. Wonder: Friendship & Cooperative Systems

Hello everyone and welcome back to another blog post. In this post we’ll be looking at the subtle online co-op systems in Super Mario Bros. Wonder. If you haven’t played it yet, you’ve been warned.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is the newest installment in the Mario Bros series. While it does a lot to mix up the series, I’m particularly interested in the co-op systems this time around. In previous installments the game is up to four players on one screen, but in Wonder, if you have an online connection, you’re frequently accompanied by up to three random players who are making their way through the level as well.

This on its own allows the player to see how other players move, tackle puzzles, and if they travel different routes, but Nintendo takes it a couple steps further.

• Players can see ghosts of online players trying to make it through.

• Standee System:

• Players can place standees, wooden-looking cutouts of their character, throughout the level. These appear for all players who are in that lobby.

• Other online players in the same lobby can then “activate” the standee via touching it as they make progress through the level.

• When a player dies, they have five seconds to move their “dead ghost” to touch an activated standee or another player to be revived.

• This mechanic gets further used by players who use their standees to mark hidden blocks or routes. Since standees need to be placed on solid blocks or ground, it is easy to infer there is a hidden block underneath a floating one.

• “Heart Points”

• Players gain heart points for ‘friendly’ actions in the game. These points have no economic use in the game, but are displayed above player’s heads and standees, giving a rating of sorts as to how helpful they are. A notification appears in the bottom left of the screen when the action is completed that states what the action was, as well as a heart symbol briefly popping into existence above the player’s head so that they can notice it while focusing on their own progress.

• There are two ways for players to gain heart points.

• Reviving others.

• When a player in the same lobby dies and is revived by another player/standee for the first time, it grants the helpful player heart points.

• This way players who are easily making their way through levels, or are lingering behind the others, can feel good about being helpful.

• Finishing together.

• When players are in a level with one another, and one touches a flag pole while another is nearby, they wait on the pole for a few seconds. This allows the other players time to join them on the flag pole. A notification appears mentioning they reached the goal together as hearts appear above their heads, awarding them bonus heart points.

• This further encourages players to stay near one another and help any who die so they can complete the level together.

What does all this do?

It allows players to create bonds with minimal communication and encourages cooperative gameplay. It also encourages players to stick close together, since if a player dies they can be revived by another player in the same lobby. In one particularly tough session I was paired into a level with a Blue Yoshi (player named Tommi). We both raced to the top of the level, dropping standees along the way. Over the course of 30+ lives we both kept trying and trying, helping each other out without requiring too much direct effort on our own parts. By the end of it, I was rooting for him, and I imagine he was for me since neither of us was willing to give up.

It also fits nicely into ⅔ of self determination theory.

What? How?

Competence

• The points go up for assisting players.

• Dropping a standee in a particularly difficult to reach area is also a way of flexing your skill to other players.

• Even if a player is slower than the others, they can feel good about being the one to revive them.

Relatedness

• I can put the standee on hidden platforms helping other players.

• Players want to stick near one another for revives and the bonus given for completing the level together.

• My standees and I can help players progress through a level.

• If a player dies, and they use their ghost to reach me while I’m further along, they can skip difficult sections.

• Having a high heart score means I know that person is going to take steps to help me out through a difficult level, and I’m thankful I’ve been paired up with them.

And that’s it for this week!

Do you think I missed anything? How would you tweak this system to make it fulfill all three needs in self determination theory?

I hope you enjoyed this post and I’ll see you next time. 😁

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NFL RUSH Weekly Match ups Functionality

And just like that we are diving face first into one of my favorite systems I developed. I thought it would be well suited I start with this because world 1-1 of Mario Bros has been written about to death and back.

The teams functionality was built based off a similar system I had seen in Zen Studios’ Star Wars Pinball. In this system the players would choose either light side or dark side then play their game of pinball and when they finish based on how well they did they were awarded points. These points were allocated towards the light side or the dark side based on which side they chose when they first logged in. The particularly interesting aspect of this was how they pit both sides up against one another. Behind the menus (Like in the following image) there was a constant struggle moving back and forth between the light side (Blue) and the dark side (Red). So every time I logged in it would have moved based on which side players were playing for.

In this screen shot we can see the dark side is currently winning.

I really liked this system and thought about what I could do to try to improve the system for our purposes. The issues I saw with this system were:

A) There was no end. Because of this no one could actually win. Thus players would eventually burn out.

B) An individual player couldn’t feel like they are making much of a difference. This is difficult because the larger the player base the smaller each individual player’s contribution is to the total effort when we are pitting players against each other.

C) There were no rewards for the player to earn upon victory.

D) I didn’t particularly care if the Dark side won even though we know the light side is aligned with the rebel scum.

How did we adapt this for the NFL apps?

As we can see from comparing the two images I have brought over the same functionality but it’s displayed in the “NFL RUSH Match ups” Bar. I initially wanted to have it take up the entire back screen but after discussing it with art we decided it was better this way because all the widgets would cover it up thus rendering the data useless. That and we were able to create a widget out of the bar, which evolved into a whole new system of social menus based around the player’s chosen team. But that will be for another time.

So as we can see the Eagles are currently beating the 49ers. We initially used the team logos but later decided to use the team rushers from the rush zone television show due to player confusion between our team matchup competition and the real life games. What I like most about how we did this screen is how everyone can tell who is winning without any thought.

So how did we deal with the needed changes?

This page shows all this week's matchups. Remember how I mentioned it turned into a whole new social system. This was part of it.

Players earn team points towards their team matchups by doing various tasks in game such as playing mini-games, posting in the forums, challenging a friend, etc.

These matchups would pit a player’s favorite team, which they chose when they first logged into the app, vs other players’ favorite teams. This solved the problem of players not particularly caring about their chosen side because we leveraged their love of their NFL team against one another.

As you can see at the top of the screen it says “2 days left”. We wanted to solve the issue of players having an endless game so we restricted each match up to last only one week. The top of the screen shows the countdown timer. During the NFL season we pitted teams who were playing each other throughout the week, in real life, against each other in the game. (Thus you can see where the confusion came from when their team won in the real world but lost in the game). At the end of the timer we would pit their team against another team (typically the team they would be playing that week). This further helped to push our players to play more and help their team to victory.

Because of the timer on each match up we were able to have a winner each week. This would help us to determine rankings for the playoffs and help us to pay out prizes to our most active players.

The final issue was making a player feel like their contributions mattered, we tried to do with notifications. When the player would do one of the actions which would gain the player team points a notification would slide down for a couple seconds telling them what they did and how many points they received. Unfortunately in the chaos, which is game development, we were unable to implement the notifications. So it still stands to be untested but the thinking goes like this: If we congratulate the player and tell them they are doing a good job and are helping their team when they do these actions, then they will want to do them more and feel more like they are contributing.

I hope this shed some light on how the teams system works. While I believe we have done an excellent job implanting it for a game based around the NFL and their teams, if you would like to see a similar but different version of this system I recommend taking a look at Helldivers (PS4, PS3 and Vita).

I mean look at that 3 fronts! It's so cool!

They use a similar system to show the movement of the front lines but instead of pitting players against one another they pit players against computer races who are trying to wipe out humanity. Also while my system and Star Wars pinball’s system pit two sides against one another theirs pits 3 sides against the players at a time. (It’s a really good game.)

I would like to thank you for sticking around to the end and bearing with me through my first design related post. I hope you learned something or at least found something useful in my post. And with that bit of light reading I bid you goodnight, until next time.

-Scott

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