The fighting game community was notably impressed a few years back when Masahiro Sakurai started showing off new Super Smash Bros. Ultimate DLC characters using only one hand to control them. Instead of having a pre-recorded sequence or a second developer to position, Sakurai controlled both characters simultaneously with one hand on each controller.
While obviously impressive, there was actually intent behind this approach. Mr. Sakurai’s latest video focuses on balancing games from a developer’s early point of view, and one of his secrets in effectively doing so involves handicapping himself while playing.
Designing a video game that’s too easy or too hard will result in the same negative outcome: people will quickly lose interest and spend their time elsewhere. Legendary game developer Masahiro Sakurai constantly preoccupies himself with finding the balance to foster engagement and get players to feel that perfect tension between challenge and satisfaction.
To begin with, development teams really only have themselves as testers. Sakurai relies heavily on this initial sample of players to get an early idea of where a game’s balance is at and needs to go, but has to keep in mind that there’s a translation between a dev team and the public.
“If you balance based on the best player on [your] staff,” he notes, “everyone else who buys the game won’t be able to make it to the end.” It’s not at all farfetched to suppose Sakurai himself is often the best player on his staff, and so it comes as little surprise that he handicaps himself while testing for balance.
He actually does this in multiple ways, all of which are covered in the video below. Give it a watch and let us know if Sakurai continues to impress you as much as he impresses us with the heights he routinely goes to in his pursuit of quality game making.
Want more from Sakurai? We recently covered his latest thoughts on proposals for bringing Goku into Smash Bros.