Sakurai Smash Bros. Diaries recap – dual-platform release, characters, and more
Game Informer has published the full Smash Bros. Diaries from Masahiro Sakurai, which were included in the magazine’s previous issues. We’ve covered them quite a bit in the past (not to mention what Sakurai shared in Famitsu that had similar information). Still, there are some interesting comments here.
Head past the break for some excerpts. You can find the complete Smash Bros. Diaries on Game Informer here.
On the dual-platform release…
The first reason is that I think both portables and home consoles have their own traits that make them fun. I’ve gone into that in previous interviews, so I’ll omit the details here.
One big reason for this approach is because I’m a freelance game designer, one without his own permanent team or company. I’m always going to be at the center of any Smash Bros. project, but since I don’t have my own personal studio, the staff changes in and out with each project. For this one, I’m working with Bandai Namco Games. Changing development studios like this also means that you can’t build out from the know-how and in-house assets you’ve accumulated over time.
As a development environment, it’s different from a publisher that can work on fighting games, shooters, and open-world titles all at once. For us, even if things look the same, it’s all completely different, completely built from scratch. If we started with a console project then moved on to the portable platform, once one team finished up their work, we’d have to wait and hand everything over to another team. In other words, working on both at the same time is what finally allows us to provide the game on both platforms. The fact is, no matter who I’m working with, I need the ability to get things right as we go along.
On why Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS were developed on two different timeframes…
The biggest reason was so we could keep the debug schedules separate from each other. Debugging a game this size is a major project involving hundreds of people, and since the two platforms offer pretty different content, we wanted to avoid conflicts during the debug stages. If we were hell-bent on a simultaneous day-and-date release, we would have wrapped up one title, put it on the back burner, and launched both games in 2015. But I doubt most people would prefer that.
We also have to consider different markets around the world when settling upon a release date. The 3DS version is launching on different dates in Japan and North America, but both versions actually went gold on pretty much the same day.
On characters fans want in the game…
I know that no matter how hard we work to get lots of fighters in the game, there are always going to be people who only wonder about the characters that aren’t there.
Among them are the Ice Climbers, who were actually in a working stage in the Wii U version during development. However, getting the two of them moving as a pair in the Nintendo 3DS version took a ton of machine power. I had the team innovate a lot to try and get them working, but we had to give up eventually. In fact, also with some of the other fighters we had to keep modifying and modifying until they finally worked.
When it comes to characters and series without any future plans – that is, without the prospect for new games to come out soon – those are always going to be a lower priority. As for porting characters from Melee, the original data is now old enough that it’s no longer a simple, straightforward process.
On the process Sakurai goes through, from the ideas behind each move to the final balancing…
First, I decide on a fighter, visualize their moves, snap poses using action figures, and bring that over to the spec crew as I work on frame timings. The general stats for moves – their speed, reach, and other traits – are more-or-less decided by this point. I then give instructions to the motion designers, and once they bring back animation for me, I directly program attack hit boxes and such.
Once a fighter is playable to some extent, I unleash them on the test players. We have around 12 of these players, and I have them play both two and four-player matches and get back to me on win/loss records and which moves seemed particularly strong or weak. That forms the basis for the long fine-tuning process.
This work takes a tremendous amount of time and energy out of me, and it’s something I wouldn’t mind leaving to others, but that has never worked well in the past. Even trying to oversee this much work already goes beyond a typical director’s workload, but I’m piling even more on top of that, as well. All I can do is try to play catch-up on my off days. However, it’s exactly this type of structure, with the director overseeing everything from the idea process to completion, which creates the consistency you see. We’re never straying from our goals.
Speaking of which, if I took all of the battle records and tester feedback at face value and tried to make the game balance completely average and fair, that would make the game boring in some ways. Even if the balance is rough in spots, it’s fun if it offers you a wide dynamic range to work with. That’s something I hope we don’t forget as we keep going.
On how characters are chosen…
The process is pretty well set. We survey character popularity and such, both in Japan and worldwide. And there’s research into games currently in development that might provide new characters. But in the end, the decisions are made by me alone, because I need to consider things like development time and so forth.
Selections are made using a wide number of factors. I consider whether a character has unique characteristics, and whether these characteristics inspire ideas that can be used to make Super Smash Bros. more fun. I also look at the prominence of the character, and if there’s a chance that character overlaps with another. I also look ?ahead to see if there are promising-looking characters from other games that are still in the early stages of development.
With all of that in mind, characters with no future – in other words, ones from series with little chance of a new release going forward – are difficult to justify unless there?s some special aim I have in mind. This doesn’t apply for alternate costumes or models for existing characters, though.
To put it simply, if I firmly believe a character can work, then I’m open to anything. But even if a character can stand by itself, if it overlaps with another character or doesn?t create any new uniqueness as a fighter, I can?t implement that.
On whether the team had time to incorporate any subtle balance changes based on the feedback of the 3DS version into the Wii U version…
“Feedback” wouldn’t be the exact term I’d use, but given that that the release dates were staggered, we naturally had the time to make some adjustments. We’ve applied a balancing patch to the 3DS version, and that was also applied simultaneously to the Wii U game. The aim here was to allow gamers to play with these balance settings on the day and date of the Wii U release.
Being able to patch the game this time around allows us to adjust the balance anytime we want. However, if we took the balance feedback we pick up from online stats and certain hardcore fans at face value, that could make the game less fun and/or destroy the balance. We attempt to maintain a wide dynamic range with the balance, so I feel like we need to watch that we don’t over-adjust in a negative direction, like cutting down abilities or trying to have all characters playable on an equal basis. Having everything be totally fair would boost the competitive aspect, but runs the chance of it no longer being about playing a game. Mediocrity would be the worst thing for this.
On why the team decided to include two versions of Pit instead of using a color swap…
Allow me to explain a bit about clone type fighters.
In the beginning, I didn’t plan to make any of them as separate character variations (clones), but rather as color variations like Alph or Little Mac. This was even if we were going to use different voices for them. However, any character that gained some uniqueness through their balancing needed to be separated so their results and statistics could be counted properly. It wouldn’t have been fair to have the results counted together even though their strengths differ between the variations.
Lucina was the first to be split off; this is because we made Marth’s moves more standard so he could be easy to handle by novice players.
Dr. Mario already had a clear uniqueness, so by letting this character throw the fireball in his Dr. Mario costume or by cutting out his clear uniqueness that was established in Super Smash Bros. Melee, we could anger fans. So we added uniqueness to him with a stat-boost mechanic and split him off as a separate character.
Dark Pit has exactly the same stats as Pit, so I first planned to handle him as a color variation. However, it would have made for a very strange setting for Black Pit to be using the Three Sacred Treasures, so we gave him a staff. One of the designers had also made the Electroshock Arm, so this was also another reason to make him a separate playable character.
In the end, what was needed for each of these changes was to reduce the work required to balance the game. Hence all these characters were adjusted relative to their clone.
For example, Marth and Lucina would only be tested against each other until they were roughly equal and in balance. For all other fighters, we take our results after fighting them against several dozen other characters. In fact, we set out on the premise that we would not include clone characters with this work.
Sakurai on the huge amount of info on Nintendo’s history in Samsh Bros….
I have been playing the NES since I was a grade-schooler, just after it came out in Japan. I’ve walked hand-in-hand with the history of gaming since, so I have a great deal of knowledge in the field. However, I’m frankly also getting old.
Simply retelling stories from the past would make me sound like a doddering old man rambling to a disinterested crowd, so I think it’s necessary to strike a fair balance between the past and present.
I don’t think people look at Smash Bros. and consider it an “old” game, per se. It is a side-view action game, however, which is hardly a new genre; that does put us at a disadvantage at times when devising the game’s visuals. Still, we keep close tabs on new games as we recall the gameplay elements of older titles, attempting to balance the two as we go forward.
