Although the roster grew to be over 80+ characters and has simpler mechanics than most fighting games, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate still manages to make most of its roster stand out from each other and offer something different.
Smash creator and director Masahiro Sakurai released a new video on his creating games channel to explain how to make characters interesting through more methodical methods like parameters.
While showing a hexagonal grid like you might see in an RPG, Sakurai points to how developers should try and accentuate and push the limits of the certain attributes to make something that has its own defined strengths and weaknesses.
He obviously points to how it’d be boring if everything was the same across the board, but at the same time warns against trying to break established rules and needs too much or else you may end up with a functionally useless design.
“Whether you’re creating playable characters or enemies, making them unique will serve to introduce strategy,” said Sakurai. “In my view, characters should be made unique enough that you can describe their distinctive traits in just a word or two.”
That carries over beyond the design into the actual programming as well with Sakurai describing how they went for mechanics and ideas they hadn’t really done before with Smash Ultimate’s DLC like Joker’s Persona, Hero’s command list, Terry’s Supers, Steve’s blocks and more challenging the team to make the game work in different ways.
This thought process could arguably be applied to other modern fighting games as well with their propensity to put more universal mechanics in like the Drive System in Street Fighter 6 and Heat System in Tekken 8 that could homogenize the roster more while still trying to find a balance to make characters feel distinct from each other.
Whether or not those have been successful is still being debated.
You can check out Sakurai’s informative yet short new video below.