In the last 12 weeks the Mario Maker Workshop has been through a lot. We started with 7 people and have expanded to 27. Some members were only here briefly. Some put in lots of effort consistently every week. And most members are somewhere in between.

The beauty of this communal learning system is that everything contributed builds up the whole. Everything matters. And nothing is forgotten. A single course submitted to the COURSES tab in our collaborative, online worksheet gives other members an opportunity to provide clear feedback, exercise their design breakdown skills, and stretch the range of gameplay possibilities they’ve experienced. Even a partially formed idea tucked away in the side of a “throw-away” level can be the spark of something great. And it’s clear to us where that spark started.

Everyone in the workshop gave an amount of effort to improvement that they were comfortable with. We all have varying levels of experience and passion for talking about games, making the best Mario levels, and improving our game design skills overall. These were the three goals set by the workshop. It is clear now that we each have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to these goals.

Now the real work begins.

Coworking is about systematizing learning. And it can only be done by leveraging a Communal Learning unit. The Mario Maker workshop final test is to make Mario course making modular. This means instead of each person focusing on and prioritizing their individual courses, we all work together and prioritize these shared projects. Instead of expecting and trying to create “the best Mario levels” on our own, we treat the community as “us” and leverage our diversity.

A common problem I see in indie game development is that creators work alone. The pros include being able to work at your own pace and make all the creative decisions. The cons are developers will likely be overworked and stretched too thin trying to acquire skills in disciplines they have little to no experience with. The reality is, all learning is likely more effective with others, whether that’s with the help of a mentor, teacher, or a learning community. The pros of communal learning are significant. And it’s time we lean into that fully.

Every workshop member has strengths and weaknesses. The first step is identifying what these are. The beauty of communal learning is that everyone knows everyone, even if its purely through the experience of playing each other’s Mario Maker courses and providing feedback. We know what kind of elements each other tends to use, the type of level design layers each prefers, the general level of difficulty we fall back to, and much more. Using the same detailed system that we breakdown the level design of Mario courses, we’ll create a detailed assessment of our pros and cons.

The next step is to be comfortable NOT improving as designers. Learning takes effort. Making courses takes effort. Effort is limited. It’s smart to understand these limits and optimize workflow. When learning, learn 100%. When creating, create 100%. In this final semester of the Mario Maker Workshop, we will be gradually reducing our learning efforts to 0% as we practice using our current skills precisely and optimizing our collaborative development efforts.

In the next 5 weeks, we will be generating Workshop PROJECTS, collaborative efforts to build Mario Maker courses. These PROJECTS allow us to break down level design into discrete pieces, scope out what we need for each piece, estimate our time and effort to complete these pieces, and assign tasks to other workshoppers.

Our Mario Maker courses will no longer be made by Workshoppers, but by "the Workshop"

This is the Mario Maker Workshop Workbench. It's a task management system specifically designed for creating Mario Maker courses collaboratively and asynchronously online. Each Workbench project starts with a project lead who picks the gameplay idea and plans out the entire scope for the project. They are responsible for starting the project and overseeing it until it reaches completion.

Each project has a built in scope plan. Based on the choices made for the project, the scope will be automatically tallied. The goal is for the project lead to use their understanding of level design and experience with course making to achieve their design goals without overscoping. Scope plans can be as small as 5 or as large as 20 points. Only one Workshopper can work on a course at a time, so the system keeps track of who the course is currently assigned to.

All of the scoping options are concepts and conditions that we've encounter in previous assignments. All workshopers should be familiar with how difficult each option is to implement and therefore how to scope for it.

This is the scope planner for easy reference. Each option has its scope value posted to the right of it.

To pass an in progress course to the next workshopper, we take screenshots of the course. The next workshopper then recreates it block-by-block. I wish there was a feature to share courses built into the game to make collaboration easier.

Creating a vision and planning the scope for some of the more advanced aspects of course creation requires an understanding of design and what each workshopper excels in.

Fortunately, the Workshoppers filled out all of these ? Blocks, a collection of self reflective questions that helped us consider our goals as a level designer. As you can see, the splattering of different colors shows that each Workshopper has strengths and weaknesses in different areas. This information helps us scope more accurately.

The result of all this work are some of the most creative, diverse, and well tuned Mario Maker levels I have ever seen. The workshop did all of this while tackling some of the most complex level design topics each week. See the following lessons for details on those topics.