The Super Mario Bros. Wonder panel at GDC was home to some interesting insight about how Nintendo returned to Mario's 2D roots to create something brand new.
Nintendo’s not the kind of company to do it, but a Mario 64 2 would be great right about now. Make everything adorably fake and lo-fi, like with puffy trees made of overlapping circles instead of intersecting spheres, but modernized enough to still clip models sensibly. Dropping JPG’d leaves while you climb them, which obey subtle wind everywhere outdoors, along with octagonal flower patches that’d otherwise sway randomly. Just plus the hell out of everything. Make it vibe the way the original did when nobody knew any better. Build a tiny world vaguely evoking a bigger one, but then pack it full of more details and oddities than any one person would ever notice. Any time a playtester gets to some hard-to-reach nook and is disappointed nothing happens, tell a dev to put stuff there. Y’know, ‘bring this flowerpot to the aquarium and there’s a secret dolphin level’ kinda nonsense. A game that looks like it weighs ten megabytes and has a strategy guide an inch thick.
Nintendo’s not the kind of company to do it, but a Mario 64 2 would be great right about now. Make everything adorably fake and lo-fi, like with puffy trees made of overlapping circles instead of intersecting spheres, but modernized enough to still clip models sensibly. Dropping JPG’d leaves while you climb them, which obey subtle wind everywhere outdoors, along with octagonal flower patches that’d otherwise sway randomly. Just plus the hell out of everything. Make it vibe the way the original did when nobody knew any better. Build a tiny world vaguely evoking a bigger one, but then pack it full of more details and oddities than any one person would ever notice. Any time a playtester gets to some hard-to-reach nook and is disappointed nothing happens, tell a dev to put stuff there. Y’know, ‘bring this flowerpot to the aquarium and there’s a secret dolphin level’ kinda nonsense. A game that looks like it weighs ten megabytes and has a strategy guide an inch thick.