Twenty eight Super Mario Maker creators have banded together and created an exhaustive series of courses push the game’s speedrun potential. Super Warp World, a community-made speedrun ruleset, brings their levels into an impressive pack full of numerous paths and secrets. The game debuted last night in a blind race and it was awesome.
Mario games are popular speedgames to race either in massive relay races or competitive format. Super Warp World started as project in early February after a Super Mario Maker race was declined placement in Awesome Games Done Quick’s marathon lineup. In an effort to solidify the game and create a more definite speedrun, community member CarlSagan42 organized 28 twenty eight creators and hackers to form a continuous series of level. The goal was to make the pack play similarly to running a full Super Mario Bros. game, instead of racing through a series of individual courses. After six months of level creation, Super Warp World was ready to play. Last night, speedrunners raced it for the first time.
“A lot of the time was spent planning the rule set,” GrandPOOBear, a speedrunner and Super Mario Maker creator who contributed to the project, told Kotaku through Twitter messages. “Testing took up a huge chunk of time as well. We wanted to be sure the jank would be limited.”
Super Mario Maker makes it difficult to organize levels from various creators into a single playlist that players can race through. As a result, making Super Warp World’s playlist took some creative thinking. Level makers would make levels before another member of the team downloaded them and then hacked their WiiU to trick the game into thinking they were made by one creator.
To ensure that Super Warp World could be enjoyed by players of all skillsets, level designers made sure to include multiple paths through each stage. A normal, direct path for casual fans allows them to play each stage while secondary paths that require advance techniques offer challenges for established players. Secret zones feature classic ‘Kaizo’ tricks like invisible blocks and devious enemy placement.
“It was very important that we allowed the player choices in this game for cool strategies, but also it has to be a game that is fun casually,” GrandPOOBear said.
Super Warp World revealed itself with a grand four player race between a group of speedrunners who had never seen the levels. They raced through the levels in the Any% category, which seeks to complete everything as fast as possible. A 100% category that collects a series of hidden coins also exist for the levels. In the end, speedrunner Aurateur came in first place with a time just over one hour and thirty minutes. The trial run had a single hiccup when racer TriHex managed to get trapped in one of the levels but otherwise proved successful.
“It did a great job of showing the potential for Warp World as a legit speedrun,” GrandPOOBear said. Super Mario Maker is a two year old that hasn’t seen support for 16 months, so to have thousands of viewers getting hype about it was awesome.”