Making "How a Super Smash Bros. Fighter is Designed"

Hi Patrons!

I just released a new video to the world. It's called How a Super Smash Bros. Fighter is Designed and you can watch it on YouTube or Nebula, or read it as an article on Substack.

To thank you for supporting this video, lemme share a little about how it was put together...

The Research

Back in October, developer Masahiro Sakurai ended his YouTube channel "Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games". This was an amazing resource... over 200 videos about game development and design, straight from the creator of Kirby and Smash Bros!

So I decided this would be a good opportunity to make a video that wrapped up many of the key lessons taught on that channel. I could make a video showing how a Smash Bros. character is made, using information from these videos.

Though, as I started to dig into the research, it turns out there was way more information to source from! Sakurai is a very vocal person - he has written a weekly column in the Japanese magazine Famitsu since about 2004, has given many interviews, and has been publicly replying to fan emails since about 1999.

Over the course of several weeks I had created a massive research archive with over 100 sources. I had info on everything from how Sakurai picks a character to how he makes those fantastic fighter reveal trailers.

With all of this information under my belt, I could turn it into a video...

Writing the script

It was an early decision to split the video into sections, to represent different parts of the process - like picking the character's moves or creating their animations.

I wanted to show these on screen visually to help the viewer know which part of the video they were on, and what is left to come. A table of contents, I guess.

Though the exact nature and order of these sections changed a fair bit throughout the process, for different reasons. There was originally a section on effects (it wasn't that interesting) and theme was once part of the roster (but it was too important - and the roster section was getting too long).

Another consideration was just how many facts and bits of trivia I was dumping on the viewer. This stuff is fascinating, but do you really need to know the source of so many different character designs, or the reasons why each individual character ended up in Smash? I would routinely go through the script and cut down the number of examples.

Capturing footage

Another reason to make this video was to have an excuse to play with my new toy: the Retrotink 4K. This is a fabulous video upscaling device that can be used to take basically any console and make it output in 4K.

Which is fun, because there's a whole decade-long era of games that are surprisingly hard to capture well.

You see, ancient stuff like NES and SNES can be emulated almost perfectly - and the pixels can be scaled up to 4K resolution without trouble. And modern stuff, like Xbox 360 and onwards, outputs in at least 1080p, and can be captured directly from the hardware using a perfect digital signal courtesy of HDMI.

But the stuff in the middle - like N64, GameCube, and PS2 - is more tricky. Emulation is okay but not perfect. And these consoles often have awful image quality - outputting at tiny resolutions over crummy analogue cable formats like composite (or RCA, to our American friends).

So enter the Retrotink 4K which can take the original games and hardware (so no emulation needed) and upscale the footage beautifully to 4K. I used this to add in a bunch of N64, Wii, and GameCube games - and they look better than you've likely ever seen them before on YouTube!

Unlocking the roster

Okay, this was a funny one.

I didn't actually own Smash Ultimate before making this video - I really enjoyed the Wii U entry but had never gotten around to buying Ultimate on Switch. But I naturally picked up a copy to make this video.

Only to boot the game up and realise... at the start of the game you only have access to eight characters! Ack! That's not going to make very good footage. So I had to first unlock all of the characters.

It turns out that the, ahem, "quickest" way to do this is to:

One: Move a lot. The game wants to dole out characters as you play the game, and the stat it uses to track this is a hidden "distance" number. So you can increase this number by making a 20 minute long match between Sonic and a random CPU opponent and then... running and back and forth. For 20 minutes.

Two: Close the game and open it again. You have to force quit the app for a new fighter to appear. Then do a 30 second Smash. At which point a new fighter will challenge you to a match. Beat them to add them to your roster.

Repeating this process to unlock all 80-plus fighters took hours. Days! It became part of my daily routine to unlock at least 3 characters a day.

The things I do for YouTube...

The motion graphics

This video needed a lot of motion graphics for things like charts, polls, and whatnot. You've seen a GMTK video before... so you know I like to make these things look nice!

I have started using some new tools (like Unity) to help me make stuff faster... but I'll talk more about that in the future when I have built up some more experience.

But one special consideration for this video was isolating the character models to show off the animations.

To do this I went through a bunch of different Smash stages until I could find one with a really blank background. The Duck Hunt stage, in Battlefield Form, was perfect. There's a platform up high that is in front of a pure blue background.

I could then unleash different animations, and remove the background with a colour key in Premiere. It's literally the same process as a green screen - but just in a video game!

The Fig-Arts Figure

Finally... there's a part in the video where I show the modelling figure that Sakurai uses on Amazon... only to realise that it's ridiculously cheap and so decide to buy one for myself. Which is exactly what happened in real life!

For the visual gag - where it rapidly cuts between clips of me clicking buttons on Amazon and then ripping open the package - that was inspired by the hyper quick cut montages in Edgar Wright movies like Shaun of the Dead. So I used tiny cuts and lots of sound effects.

It's not perfect but it was fun to film and make!

There we go. Enjoy the video and if you have any questions about it - please leave them in the comments down below!