Late last year, Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai wrote several editorials about the development behind his Wii U and 3DS fighting game series for Game Informer Magazine and Digital. Rather than having to dig through the magazines to find each one of Sakurai's pieces, we've included all of them in this story. They are listed in chronological order, starting with his first piece that ran in Game Informer issue 256 and ending with an interview in which he answers our questions about the Smash Bros. series.
Each of Sakurai's editorials dive deep into the development of the games. He phrases his points in the form of questions that were frequently asked by fans of the games. Along with his insight, he provided images that show off some of the development techniques he used, such as using action figures to frame animations. He also snapped a photo of his desk.
Without further delay, here's Sakurai:
Hello to all Game Informer readers! My name is Masahiro Sakurai, and I'm the director of the Smash Bros. series. For more than 10 years, I've been writing a regular column for Weekly Famitsu, the biggest game magazine in Japan. Now, for a few months, I’ll be doing the same thing for Game Informer.
I'm sure most of you are reading this because you're interested in hearing about Smash Bros., so let's kick off by answering a few of the questions I'm being asked frequently.
Why 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.
Why were the two titles 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.
Where is [insert character here]?
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.
Animation Through Action Figures
The note Sakurai sent to his art team for the Mii character animations:
1) Forward Aerial Attack: A two-part forward kick. First the right leg cuts in from the side, then the left leg revolves around and brings it home.
2) Up Aerial Attack: A shooting, upward kick that cuts with the side of the leg first. Strikes up and forward, then back.
3) Neutral Aerial Attack: A textbook jump kick. A bit different from Mario's attack.
What kind of process do you go 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.
One more thing before I wrap up. I’m active on Twitter [@Sora_Sakurai], but that service is meant to be Japan-only. If you have a message you’re burning to send me, I would request that you not use an auto-translate service. English is honestly easier to read than that. Also keep in mind that, just as with Japanese, I’m not able to answer any questions that I receive over social networks – sorry!
See you next month.