“Sorry about that. I’m a bit nervous so I just broke out into song,” joked Masahiro Sakurai, the designer of the Smash Bros. series, after regaling us with a few bars of the chanting trailer soundtrack. He gave an in-depth and very articulate look at the process of developing the latest installment’s character roster.

The line-up was pretty well finalized as early as 2005, with the exception of Sonic, who was added just last year. Characters were selected for their individuality, unique abilities, and balance of both the fighting and game series representation.

After describing some of these choices, Sakurai continued on to discuss how they unified the look of all the characters as much as possible by using intermediate colors, textures, and lighting. Not only does this help make Link and Mario feel natural side by side, but it gives the Smash Brothers team interpretations a lot more detail than the regular models.

He gave special emphasis to their Pit, who, not having had an update in about 20 years, was really fun to design. “Please don’t tell me this isn’t the Pit you all remember, because it is,” he said, even as he pointed out the “pretty cute” Grecian footwear, and the spinning bow attack “sort of like Darth Maul in Star Wars.”

Next he elaborated on how he designed the moves for each character. It starts with brainstorming, which he assumed was the easiest part. There are four parts to each animation: standby, windup, strike, and follow-through. He said they don’t have to be super realistic, because it’s supposed to be more about fun for the player.

To show his team the vision he had for each move, Sakurai posed 4″ Microman action figures and took 30-50 shots per character. He showed lots of side by side pictures with Wario and the figures, Pit and the figures (with twisty tie bow prop), Sonic and the figures (with added visual effects for his spin move), and others. Even for characters like MetaKnight who aren’t really shaped like a standard human being, he said that it was better to have the action figure tool than to just use a text explanation.

“To build the characters you must synthesize the intent of the originals, Smash Bros. game design, and character moves,” Sakurai explained, leading up to his discussion of parameters. He did all the work on this part of the game, which involved refining performance again and again to get the character speeds, throw distances, and other numerical issues just right.

“Hitting the mark here may well be the most important thing…” and he explained that it was very important to go back to the original games and “sniff out” the reasons why, for instance, Mario jumps and falls quickly, while Samus floats. The answer is that Samus needs to aim and shoot while she jumps. Sonic is actually quite slow until he gets going, which is why players feel such intense speed once he’s topped out.

He played a bit of the game for us (showing Snake stick a butterfly bomb to Pit’s face and remote detonating it, getting a funny screenshot of Pit’s wings poking through Snake’s back during a grab animation) before ending his talk by reiterating how important it is to market your game effectively. Descending into “dojo update hell” was a necessary task for his dev team, and he wrote the daily updates himself.

Super Smash Brothers Brawl ships for North America, in case you somehow forgot, on March 9th!

Tags: gdc, gdc-08, smash-bros, Super-Smash-Brothers-Brawl

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