Super Mario Maker, a Wii U game that lets you create your own Mario levels, comes out September 11. I've got an early copy, and so I'll be telling you all about my experiences attempting to create game levels that are not terrible. Turns out it's quite a challenge!

Many of the levels that have been created so far fall into the "evil" category. This is not surprising, since it's very easy to create insanely difficult levels. I'll have more to say about this later. What I'm trying to do is create real Mario levels, the sort of thing you'd actually find towards the beginning or middle of a typical game, and actually make them enjoyable.

Mario Maker starts you out with a very limited set of tools—not even enough to recreate World 1-1 from the original game. Using these (and a couple I acquired on the next day), I decided to follow the Mario playbook and build a level around iterations of a single gameplay mechanic—in this case, wall jumps.

You know how to wall-jump. I know how to wall-jump. But one should begin a level like this by teaching people how to wall-jump. In this particular case, I set up a series of the simplest possible obstacles. You can only clear them by wall-jumping, so there's no way a player could accidentally miss it. There are no bottomless pits, so you can't die. And there's a line of coins showing you the path to take. The idea here is that the player cannot proceed and has nothing else to do but figure out that wall-jumping is a thing.

Once that happens, things get progressively more interesting. This whole first area has no enemies, only a few very small pits to avoid, and is actually a puzzle—there comes a point (in the screenshot at top) where you can't run to the right anymore, and have to figure out that you can now wall-jump your way to the ceiling to continue. That part is supposed to be a little bit of a head-scratcher, but by then I've taught you a lot about how wall-jumping works, so you can't reach that pinch point without the tools you need to move on.

Ultimately I figured maybe the level was a little too easy, but that I should put it out there to get feedback anyway. So I uploaded it and waited for some players to try it and maybe even comment.

"Evil jumps." I was crushed. What jumps were evil? It was supposed to be easy, if anything! Then my wife (very good at games) came home. She couldn't even do the first wall jump and land on the platform. The third wall jump, she just kept skidding over it, and finally just put the controller down. My meticulously planned "easy" level!

I picked up the controller and I couldn't even do what she was doing. I couldn't not land on the platform. And I remembered the old adage about practicing—you don't practice until you do it right, you practice until you can't do it wrong. I'd spent so much time editing, playing, editing, playing, editing, playing that I was just muscle-memorying the whole thing start to finish, and I didn't ever consider that it would be too hard.

(Quite frankly, I think we all know that a lot of games in the 16-bit era were pretty much designed exactly like this.)

I was able to tweak things pretty easily just by expanding the platforms. But what I learned is, you don't know how hard your own game is. I thought I understood this and was designing around it, but what I know now is that it is not fully understandable. You must playtest.