Kirby's Adventure is Inspiration

  A lot of people analyze Super Mario Bros. for teaching through gameplay; However, I say Kirby's Adventure is outright a tutorial on game design.  Well, the first three worlds at least.  Which is fair, y'know?  I forgot how short individual stages are in Kirby, but moreover I didn't notice originally that every stage features only a single aspect which is very efficiently played with.  The short levels are like candy and keep you going.  The game has points... that are pointless, but reinforce that higher is better (bonus stages), or mark only partial successes/failures (That thar egg toss and the quick draw) as "not quite enough for a 1up"

  1up... this seems to be the Nintendo badge of progress in the old days.  In Mario they were well hidden and coins were scarce.  Jumping out of an arcade era, each and every 1up is essentially a quarter (or a third of a quarter).  In Kirby's Adventure, aside from the areas that open new passages (World 3 and on), the 1up is the primary exploration reward... moreso than even Maxim Tomatoes (the full life restoring collectable).


  That aside:  The point that really caught my eye in Kirby's Adventure was stage 2-2 (I think) where you first get the Wheel item.  You climb a small staircase with enemies in it (which the game has "patterned" the player into recognizing as a miniboss fight) and defeat the wheel boss.  Using wheel and moving to the right you hit enemies, blocks, go up and down slopes, skip over small gaps and eventually impact the far wall.   In one short swift segment they demonstrated every possible way to "win" with the wheel.

But winning isn't everything - - -

  2-3 (Probably) starts you in a small pit and you're likely still holding that Wheel item from the previous stage.  You fight a single enemy with parasol.  If you are hit the small pit you start in is more likely to help you preserve your Wheel star.  Ok, get this, there's a semi-long gap to the right you have to jump over.  The starting pit helps you not just Wheel right into it without thinking, you have the jump to the edge of the pit first.  From here, if you wheel - you will crash into the front end of the end of the gap...  near the bottom of the screen!  They demonstrated the failings of the wheel item, Kirby's dead?  Nope, this area was carefully constructed - yes, if you press nothing you'll die, but if you push either Up or A you'll be able to fly away, if you push (or hold) right you'll land on a small nook, or if you push B you'll re-enter wheel form and impact the right end of the pit - bumping you on to the next edge.

  This is where Kirby's Adventure excels over Super Mario Bros. (/opinion)  Assuming Kirby survives this tiny hazard, the stage continues to make things difficult for users of the Wheel on other ways.

  Later in the game you encounter the Throw ability in virtually the same way.  It's introduced through a new miniboss, stressing its importance as a feature, and the very next room is constructed in such a way that even if you had no idea of the attack nature of the Throw ability, you'd still try to "Press B" on the singular enemy and throw that guy forward.  On the right side of the screen is a single row of common star bricks, which is destroyed by that enemy - showing you can hit distant objects.  In addition, if you are hit by the enemy (unlikely, but possible), the small enclosed area makes it very hard to lose your star (since impacting the enemy to lose the star removes the only way to lose the star again)

  In this way, I started the game over to pay more attention to the subtle visual cues.  That's when I noticed the visuals in the first stage - the foreground land graphics are laid out on a grid (well, ya, this is how the NES works), but they were done so visually, with alternating "cookie" colours of sugary brown and reddish / yellow and green surrounded by a thin black line marking the collision boundaries.  Background objects (NES workings) were also placed on the sprite grid, but due to the visual grid work of the foreground it is easy to see the background grid is offset by one half tile (8 texels).  ... It's a guide on appealing level design!

So, I'm studying it carefully.