Masahiro Sakurai, creator of both the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. franchises, boasts a seemingly perfect blend of creativity and elbow grease as the games he develops have a knack for standing out as classics.
The master has been slowly but surely sharing secrets on his YouTube channel, and recently dropped a quick video in which he explains a relatively simple but incredibly impactful approach that ensures his visuals are always alive.
The visual trick Sakurai gets into deals with altering the center of gravity of objects one is animating. This effectively makes them appear more multidimensional in their movements, making them appear more prominent, significant, and impactful.
We’re all likely familiar with 2019’s wildly successful Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, a modern title where one should expect all the latest technological bells and whistles to be brought out and executed on at the highest of levels. Sakurai does use some examples from Ultimate to illustrate his point, but he starts with a much older title: 1992’s Kirby’s Dreamland for the Game Boy.
As one who logged more than a few hundred hours into Kirby’s Dreamland whilst riding in the back of mom’s car, I can say I was ensnared by this relatively simple game repeatedly thanks to to how satisfying and fun it was to play through. My pre-teen brain wasn’t exactly calculating why at the time, but Sakurai’s new video hits at least one of the nails on the head.
Kirby’s Dreamland has a vast array of enemies, a more straightforward example of which has to be the canons that shoot cannonballs. Especially when you’re talking about the original Game Boy, with a 160 x 144 pixel screen resolution, you might think something as simple as single frame nudges to a projectile animation wouldn’t mean much.
Instead of just having the cannonballs track across the screen in a purely horizontal fashion, Sakurai chose to animate them further by causing them to wobble by adding six frames of additional movement as they travel. I vividly recall these particular projectiles from my Dreamland adventures more than 25 years ago, though I can’t say I necessarily would had they not been animated with this extra flair.
It’s this kind of thinking that Sakurai uses to make every last frame of every last animation in every one of his titles stand out in some way or another. It’s a significant part of what makes things feel a little more satisfying, daunting, and generally alive while you’re playing Sakurai games, and you don’t need to be working with insanely complex visuals to achieve it.
Want more from Sakurai? Be sure to watch through his other recent video in which he spoke about why he doesn’t feel Goku will ever be a part of a Smash Bros. title despite fans from all over the gaming universe hoping for such an experience.