JonLeung Said:
I thought that, for the most part, the choices we made when many of us worked on Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES) worked out pretty well, with the pipes extended "outside" of the map pieces and all. I think there may have been a fortress or two later on in the game where that didn't work perfectly, but you'd expect that as long as you have it fairly coherent, anyone looking at it would make sense out of it.
I'd like to know something about these "extended pipes"... and how the rooms were layed out. Basically, how did you figure which positions to place rooms, especially in stages where there are lots of pipes that go from and to different rooms, (particularly 8-4 in SMB 1)? And how were the extensions made? Were they "cropped" from a pipe in some level, and then copied and pasted for the required length?