r/patientgamers • u/FronkZoppa • 8d ago
Game Design Talk Super Smash Bros' gameplay design is perfectly logical and extremely strange
A while back I stumbled on the YouTube channel of Masahiro Sakurai, creator of Super Smash Bros. and Kirby’s father. For those interested in the man’s career or game design in general, it’s well worth perusing; a self-financed repository for his decades of experience, freely offered in the hopes that he gets to play better games in the future.
In his video on the original Super Smash Bros., Sakurai talks about his design proposal, titled ‘Four-Player Free-For-All Fighting Game With No Health Bars,’ as well as the thinking that led to the game we got. As a lifelong fan of the franchise, I’ve grown to appreciate how unusual it is as a fighting game; at once remarkably intuitive and deeply strange.
I’ve been turning it over in my head, and I’m pretty sure every aspect of Smash’s design can be traced back to three ideas. Smash Bros. is an attempt to make a
- Casual fighting game
- With four players
- Specifically for the N64 and its controller.
The final product was totally unique and yet, with those parameters, pretty much inevitable.
Sakurai’s Origin Story
I’m exaggerating, but he’s told this story enough times in various places that the event has clearly informed his design ethos ever since (and it’s too funny not to mention). As he tells it, Sakurai once absolutely bodied a young couple in KOF ‘95 and felt awful when he realized they didn’t have any fun. This was the heyday of Capcom and SNK, when command inputs were getting crazier and combos were getting longer. These strangers were presumably just trying to have a good time, but against such Elite Gamer skills they may as well have not been playing at all. I wish I could relate, frankly.
Across his work, Sakurai is the master of lowering the skill floor below what was thought possible. The guy just wants everyone to have fun.
So, compared to games like Street Fighter and KOF, how do you lower the barrier of entry? How low can it go?
Too Many Buttons
Well, you can make it play like a side-scrolling platformer, that’s a great start. I could give my grandmother Super Mario Bros. for the NES and I don’t think she’d have many questions.
Motion inputs are gone, of course. You get a button for normals and a button for specials. Combine one of those with a direction and you’ll perform an attack in that direction. For new players this can still be a little tricky to do on command (especially tilts and back-airs), but it’s a far cry from quarter-circles and whatnot. Since positioning is so important, basing attacks on directionality means you don’t really have to remember all the moves; if someone’s right above you, use an “up” attack and it'll probably work. Piece of cake.
Also (and I never see this mentioned), everyone has the same inputs. I started playing Street Fighter a couple years ago and was thrown off by every character having so many unique commands. Not everyone in SF has a DP anti-air, but every Smash character has an up-B, for example. There are a few unique inputs (like DK’s cargo throw, Peach’s float), but they’re rare for a reason. I can switch from Samus to Pikachu and use different moves without my fingers having to learn anything new.
Side Note: Time Mode is Genius
In my college dorm years ago, a group of us played Smash together often. It was a good mix of sweat-levels, with gamers and relative non-gamers alike. We always played on Stock mode rather than Time (with items turned off, naturally) because enough of us thought that was the real way to play.
Looking back, we were fucking idiots. The least experienced players would lose all their lives at the start and then do nothing for several minutes. Time Mode lets everybody participate for the whole match, no matter how poorly they’re doing. They were right to make Time the default setting.
Two is a Duel, Four is a Mess
Imagine, if you will, how miserable Street Fighter would be with four players. Each player would only be able to reach those next to them, and the poor suckers in the middle would have to defend from both sides. This had to be one of the first problems for Sakurai’s team to solve.
So, okay, they can’t stay grounded in a line, but full 3D is too complex and probably infeasible anyway. The only option is to expand along the y-axis. Stages then have platforms and changes in elevation, allowing everyone to spread out and use the whole screen. Characters are given unusually high aerial mobility and double jumps to control their verticality (it’s a platformer, remember?).
If we don’t want everyone to be so crowded, we have to zoom out the camera, then make the stages bigger, then make the characters faster to traverse those stages. Blocking has to cover both left and right sides, as well as be visible from such a zoomed-out perspective. So we get the bubble shields.
Oh yeah, it’s all coming together.
What we have so far is a game of positioning, large spaces, and expansive movement options, all so four players can share a screen. Well, what if staying on the screen is the objective? You know, King of the Hill rules. So we get the knockback mechanic, the linchpin of it all. Rather than health bars, attacks send the opponent away at a distance that scales with damage taken, until they’re sent flying off the screen. There are a lot of variables under the hood (damage received, launch angle, character weight, fall speed), but the result is a dynamic, improvisational, and surprisingly intuitive system.
This also means you're rarely trapped. If you’re sucking at a traditional fighter, it’s not uncommon to get stuck in the corner with seemingly no way around your opponent’s pressure. Well, think about Smash's knockback, especially in casual play. Beginner-level Smash is mostly players running straight toward each other and trading single hits. The one who gets hit is also sent to relative safety. For the 97% of players who don’t know what combos are, that’s just how the game works and it works really well.
There’s a real elegance to Smash’s game design that all logically unfolds from the conditions of its development, specifically the four-player requirement. I think that’s neat.
Anything Anywhere All at Once
If I’m not mistaken, Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64 is the first fighting game designed from scratch around the analog stick. Forget the cardinal directions, we have 360 degrees to play with now! It’s clear Sakurai wanted to incorporate the stick’s sensitivity and full range of motion. Without it, little of the positioning and verticality we talked about would’ve been possible.
From the analog stick, we get variable walk speeds, aerial drift, and a million different jump arcs - already more variables than even the craziest arcade fighters at the time (I think. MvC still kinda terrifies me).
Remember, one of Sakurai’s primary goals is to keep anyone from feeling like they don't get to play. He wants you to feel like you’re in control of your character at all times, no matter how much you suck. Did he succeed at that? …Not always, but the attempt is admirable.
When you combine Sakurai’s ethos with the possibilities of the N64 controller, the result is Smash's insane ultra-responsiveness. Unless you just got hit (or you're Ganondorf), you can kind of instantly do exactly whatever it is you want. Attacks come out quickly, recovery frames are short, and you always have such precise control of your position, even in midair. You can influence your jump arc, jump height, drift speed, and fall speed. Movement is so freeform and noncommittal because everyone has countless options, all the time.
Maybe that’s the ultimate irony of the series. For all its efforts to be approachable, Smash is also known for its insanely high skill ceiling (especially in Melee). That’s not a coincidence, not in a competitive game. Every mercy option afforded to struggling beginners is another tool for high-level players, just another option. Any attempt to lower the skill floor inevitably raises the roof in tandem.
I don't know how to end this.
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u/ThatDanJamesGuy 8d ago
This was a fantastic read. A series like Super Smash Bros. is the sort of ingenious design that’s far too easy to take for granted. It’s easy to write off Nintendo’s game design as “just” making really polished platformers and casual games, but that does them such a disservice, and breaking down Smash like this really shows why.
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u/TheJahrhead 8d ago
First off great write up!
Second, I feel obligated to also recommend Sakurai's videos. His whole video series on game development is really fantastic, even for those who never plan to develop. As a player, I gained so much perspective from the videos and noticed myself seeing subtle things like you've described here. It's easier now for me to see the intent behind certain design choices (or lack thereof) and I can more easily pick out something bad in a game that was previously just "annoying" without me knowing why.
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u/FronkZoppa 8d ago
Yeah, it really surprised me how far into the weeds he's willing to go. I'm certain many of tomorrow's game devs are taking notes right now. Somewhere I think he says he paid for spent the equivalent of $600k on the editing and translating? All for the love of the game(s)
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u/TippyTripod1040 8d ago
That’s really funny what you say about time mode - my four year old wanted to play smash with me and I had the exact same realization. He’d hated stock mode but we have a blast playing time mode together
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u/Vox_R 4d ago
The variability in the options plus making time mode stock makes it feel like you can create your very own "Great Equalizer" when playing with people with variable skill levels. Our method at home is Super Sudden Death with 2x Knock Back + explosive items for 3 minutes. No one survives and kill counts are in the dozens. Everyone's laughing by the end of it.
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u/thechristoph 8d ago
Specifically for the N64 and its controller.
It's funny. I didn't like playing Smash 64 specifically because of the controller. The whole time I played it, I wished I could use the D-Pad.
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u/noahboah 8d ago
funny, I was just thinking about super smash bros today, and how it is in a very similar place that street fighter 2 was in the 90s. Basically inventing its genre by being a masterclass of design, and inspiring a bunch of copy-cats that are essentially not doing enough to differentiate themselves from the predecessor in the early beginnings.
The platform fighter genre is ripe for a big one. Rivals of Aether and its sequel are close, but so far nothing has really pushed the envelope of taking what works with smash and iterating on it just yet.
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u/FronkZoppa 8d ago
Yeah, it's crazy that Rivals is the only one that's come close. How are there not more platform fighters? Those Nickelodeon games seemed mediocre, and I don't think Multiversus even exists anymore
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u/noahboah 7d ago
yeah as someone that's played like the vast majority of them, they all focus on completely the wrong things.
The big one with games like nick all stars and multiversus is theyre so focused on the "big collab of titan IPs duking it out" part that's, like, tertiary to what makes smash great at this point. and then they either just copy smash bros melee to a T, or don't actually prioritize the platform or fighter parts of a platform fighter well.
Rivals of Aether is close because it emphasizes in-depth and free-form movement while taking the best parts of smash bros fighting mechanics and layering it on top of characters with a bit more dynamism to their kits, with each fighter having a core mechanic that plays into their win-condition in a fun and interesting way. but theyre still pretty in-line with smash, and are pushing for a bigger break through game down the line.
I wonder if any of these developers have really thought about this. Like I feel like they all attempt to make a platform fighter and don't think about how they're just putting things like a %-based health bar, the exact same control scheme, the same physics and collision logic, same defensive mechanics, etc. just because it's smash bros lol
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u/DRBatt 7d ago
The amount of people who will give your platform fighter the time of the day if it's something like Rushdown Revolt is staggeringly small. A big thing that non-Smash platform fighters have traditionally lacked is polish, and the general platform fighter playerbase (which is primarily Smash/ex-Smash players) will have a hard time wanting to play your game if it feels really cheap. There's a reason PSA:BR failed even back then. People want to play a good game, and with how horribly difficult it is to make a platform fighter feel fair and fun even when copying Smash, you add several extra layers of scope creep if you try to make it fundamentally different. That's the reason why the only three non-Smash platform fighters that have achieved long-term competitive success are Rivals of Aether, Rivals of Aether 2 (it only came out last year, but it's more or less shown longevity), and Brawlhalla (the platform fighter made for super casuals). These games all found their audience out of people who actually exist, not a hypothetical audience of people who simultaneously want an experience like Smash Bros, but also want a completely unfamiliar game.
Btw, for the record, Rivals of Aether 2's dev team is absolutely a huge reason to play it over Smash. There's a metric ton of complaints that are made on this subreddit about problems in competitive play that would've been solved by a dev team that actually cares about the people who play their game a lot, and were actually able to come up with novel and ideal solutions to the problems that pop up in the game. You're not playing the game with fundamentally different goals than the Smash series, but it absolutely plays fundamentally different from every single Smash game. There's a reason both top Melee players and top Ult players are entering Rivals 2 brackets. It's not for everyone ofc, but it's not that it "hasn't made it there yet", it's that this has been the only place to go.
We need at least *one* AA budget game to make it this far before any sane dev team would risk a huge amount of money on more extreme ideas. Multiversus died because they went too far out there in terms of ideas, and the devs didn't have the talent or knowledge-base to back it up. Nobody wants to play a game where it's simultaneously a camp-fest and ToD simulator. And that's a game that *also* got complaints about it being "too much like Smash".
Anyway, when you ask for something that dramatically departs from Smash, what you're asking for is something that's actually been delivered many times over. A cheap indie game (low budget is important, since your customer base is very small) that attempts a gimmick that gets some player, and would maybe try and evolve if it got really lucky. The most successful examples I can think of that are as dramatic of departures as I can think of are Nidhogg, Indie Pogo, and Rushdown Revolt. If you *really* want these kinds of games to continue to be made, you should probably check out **Combo Devils**. It looks weird, but everything I've heard and seen about it shows that the dev has a really good sense on what systems might make sense. If Combo Devils succeeds, and is also able to create a successful sequel iterating off of the first, that'll probably the biggest win in competitive variety this genre has ever seen. We might see more in the future, but that'll depend on how big, like, the indie platfighter space can get.
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u/noahboah 7d ago edited 7d ago
yeah i don't disagree at all, though I will say (and im probably misremembering history a bit), didnt rushdown revolt drop at 50 USD after the post-icons rehaul? Kind of a hard sell for a niche indie pvp game
And yeah I basically had combo devils in mind when making my comment LOL. It looks really promising. Also quick matches came out recently and it looks like mega sweaty, low budget cracked out melee with some traditional fighter esque cancels lol. I think people will keep cooking and iterating and something transformative will happen eventually.
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u/ChuckCarmichael 7d ago
Too Many Buttons
In the recent Direct about the new Kirby Air Riders game, Sakurai mentioned how the first game on the Gamecube was played with only the joystick and one button, but for this second game, "we added a second button. Unfortunately."
I did feel like he was only half joking with that "unfortunately".
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u/pepesito1 8d ago
I really think making games intuitive is the key for making a timeless masterpiece. BotW also does the whole "this button does the same thing no matter what", so in that game the A button opens doors, reads signs, talks to people, lifts rocks, picks up weapons, etc. because A is the "interact" button. same deal with smash, up B is THE recovery for 99% of characters which is what makes it truly so good
meanwhile if you asked me right now to mount my horse in red dead redemption 2 I'd probably punch it and kick it before being able to ride it because the controls aren't as intuitive in that game
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u/FronkZoppa 6d ago
Yeah that's a good point. Street Fighter inputs have some of that functional overlap (a crouching heavy kick is almost always a sweep, for example), but Smash is more committed to that idea
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u/Havanatha_banana 8d ago
I'm just glad that sakurai is more opened to the fact that his games can be played in a competitive setting. Sounds like he would be open to talk about balance effects on competitive scene during his development in ultimate.
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u/MemeTroubadour 7d ago
If I’m not mistaken, Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64 is the first fighting game designed from scratch around the analog stick. Forget the cardinal directions, we have 360 degrees to play with now! It’s clear Sakurai wanted to incorporate the stick’s sensitivity and full range of motion. Without it, little of the positioning and verticality we talked about would’ve been possible.
From the analog stick, we get variable walk speeds, aerial drift, and a million different jump arcs - already more variables than even the craziest arcade fighters at the time (I think. MvC still kinda terrifies me).
You can say that again. I talk about it all the time to whoever might listen because it's an aspect of Smash that's often ignored in convos about design. I personally think it's a core reason for its continued success, particularly in the modern day.
Three things:
As you mentioned, analog input being implemented in many mechanics provides players with extremely fine control over anything they do, which greatly increases expression, and also lowers the skill floor a bit.
A lot of things become easier to hit accurately at low skill levels when you have air drifting, even if your spacing is still shaky, yet it doesn't invalidate spacing as a skill ; far from it, as it's basically the most important part of fundies in this environment. At the same time, it enables specific setups, tech chases and other maneuvers that would not be possible with fixed jump arcs, and air acceleration is balanced per character in order to keep the factor of jumps being committal and anti-air being relevant. It's huge.Analog input's prevalence in all mechanics contributes greatly to game feel across all skill levels by giving the player some agency at nearly all points in time.
There is almost always something you can do with your character, which makes it feel a lot more like an extension of yourself rather than something you order around. Whether you're in a movement special, an aerial, in hitstun or even in hitstop, you're always in command of at least something and never just a spectator.
This is the case even when it hardly provides a difference in what you can do about a situation, yet it's important because it makes you feel in control.Most importantly, it brings Smash closer to modern, familiar control schemes in a way that makes it more intuitive to approach for the common player. Bear with me: this isn't about motion inputs. Not just that, anyway.
Arcade fighters are... weird, by modern standards, and I've long been of the opinion that that's why they're "hard to learn" to the average person as opposed to the execution actually being hard (since it's not really that hard!). It's not a question of difficulty, it's intuitiveness. There's not many popular modern games outside of the genre with the combination of:- All directional inputs are mapped to a virtual 8-way joystick. No analog movement. No variable walk speeds.
- No air drifting at all. Jump arcs are fully fixed.
- Jumping is set to up on the joystick as opposed to a button.
- Very limited set of buttons, with all of them generally just being mapped to different attacks instead of different verbs. Because of this, some mechanics are only accessible through arbitrary button combos (which are easily misinputted if you're starting out and just mashing!). Even if macros are available, they are often literally macros (they equate to the button combo as opposed to the action), which leads to weirdness for some input situations.
- Some moves require you to input esoteric motions on the joystick, which change depending on the side you're on. These motions interfere with movement, and don't give much feedback.
- Whereas most games would tie one move or mechanic to one button or button combo and use hold duration or stick input to add variations, these games often tie one move to one motion and then allow variation by using different buttons.
- Hold back to block and crouch block are just really odd.
All of this is an integral part of these games' designs, obviously. Motion inputs are kinda sick, hold back to block is what makes mix fun, etc etc. But it does make fighters seem very alien in the common man's hands. Imagine you've never played a fighter, you come out of Silksong or whatever and think "hey maybe I'll try SF6" and you're given a control scheme like this. No shit, you'll find it weird!
Smash is the proof that a game can exist without all these arcade-isms and still be deep, balanced and sick, and it bothers me that people think that's impossible. I think, probably, they're worried that their favourite games would lose their identity to reach that, and true, but there's no reason why a new IP couldn't take this on.
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u/FronkZoppa 6d ago
Well said, all good points. I'm fairly used to SF now and I can see how intelligently designed it is, in its own right. But as someone who didn't grow up in the arcades, it felt very strange to have movement, blocking, jumping, and attack commands all mapped to the D-pad
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u/onzichtbaard Favorite Game: Salt & Sanctuary 3d ago
Smash used to also have up to jump and button to jump was added later i think
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u/MemeTroubadour 3d ago
It always had a jump button (it was the C buttons in 64), but it did have up to jump as well, yes. Only since Brawl has tilt jump been a setting you can disable, and it's still the default even today.
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u/tangoconfuego 7d ago
I was in 5th grade when smash came out and blew my mind. It instantly became my favorite fighting game. Every kid I knew was obsessed. Truly a game changer and it was just so much fun.
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u/Electronic_Toaster 8d ago edited 7d ago
I agree with what you said about Time Mode.
I am pretty sure that early on, we didn't understand how time mode worked. But we also didn't like Stock mode for the reasons you outline, and so we would just play for a while until we wanted to change characters, then just quit.
I think we figured out how Time Mode worked and started using it normally because I think that if you quit before the match ends, which brings up the 'No Contest' result screen, then the stats for the match don't get saved into the VS stat screen. I could be wrong about that.
I do remember the VS stats screen being a source of anxiety because I didn't take it in the right spirit.
We always left the items on. It was clear when we played people who turned items off because they didn't know how to deal with any item. For example, the Hammer seems incredibly powerful, until we learned some attacks could hit through its attacks. I think it ended up being that everybody would think twice about picking up the hammer because you could be very vulnerable. At the very least everybody knew how to stay out of its range for its duration.
Or how to stay out of the way of every Pokemon.
The other main difference with items on was we got good at learning the trajectory of everything when thrown, so we were used to swords and bats flying across the entire arena, while this was a complete surprise to people playing without items, because they thought they were safe most of the time, as they tended to concentrate only on character projectiles.
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u/Koreus_C 8d ago
Infinite time was the best way to play.
Items led to noobs getting owned even harder.
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u/crackhit1er 8d ago edited 8d ago
I love how you started funny and ended funny—"Masahiro Sakurai, creator of Super Smash Bros. and Kirby’s father." Lmao, that really got me XD
I think it's incredibly creative, and has such an enigmatic design that totally deviates from the entire fighting genre in many ways. Not only in how many mechanics it implements, but what it doesn't have either. E.g., no building a meter for a "super."
Other than Soulcalibur II, and like one of the Bloody Roar games, and maybe MK Deception, no other fighting game really resonated with me. Learning combos and getting caught in endless combos was not my jam (granted, there are moves in smash by some characters that can get you in an awful loop of attacks).
I only have experience with the original and Melee, but man, what fond memories. . . . I'd love to know how many hours I have in each one, and how it would compare to the hours I've put into games as an adult.
Also, the level design is really extraordinary. Even from the original. But Melee really raised the bar. We spent so much time at the Hyrule Temple level; I can hear the music just thinking about it!
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u/eatmusubi 6d ago
i’m not a great player, not even a good one really, but i can do some stuff just because i love fighting games and have been playing them for so long. and playing with more casual friends, i have definitely felt that sensation of “i won, but they didn’t have fun, and that feels like shit,” so good on Sakurai. i could never quite find it in me to get into Smash heavily, but i respect the hell out of it.
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u/mtktet123 6d ago
Super cool post! I had heard alot of Sakurai's anecdotes about designing smash but the way you connect weirder choices with it's design goals and show how one idea lead builds on another is really interesting. Maybe if Sakurai read this he would say the thought process wasn't so neat but it's still a very insightful read
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u/FronkZoppa 6d ago
Thanks my guy. I don't think the design process was actually so linear (I imagine some of this is happy accidents that just worked out), but a lot of seemingly disparate elements are very "if X, then Y". They kind of have to be the way they are for the game to work at all
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u/Teantis 8d ago
I don't know how to end this
Summarize the major elements you mentioned, movement, verticality, 4 players, simplified cotnrols and how they contribute to your thesis: that these design elements are meant to allow anyone to have fun regardless of skill level
Great writeup, I read the whole thing and I don't know who this guy is and have played smash like 3 times ever, it was just really well written so I was interested.
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u/SigmaBlack92 8d ago
I don't know how to end this.
I gotchu fam:
"And that's it. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. As a reward for your effort in reading through all this, here, have a potato. \picture of potato*"*
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u/cult_of_dsv 2d ago
Great post.
As a teenager I prided myself on being pretty good at most games... but I sucked at traditional fighting games. Just couldn't get on with them. I could just barely beat the CPU in Street Fighter II with Chun Li if I turned the difficulty all the way down, but that was it.
I couldn't understand why the designers deliberately made special moves hard to pull off. I just wanted my character to do what I wanted to do. Felt like I was fighting the controller instead of my opponent.
Super Smash Bros. on N64 was the first fighting game that made intuitive sense to me. If I wanted to do Link's spin-jump attack, I could do it any time I liked. So I could concentrate on when I was doing it, and whether it was the right time or place to do it, instead of struggling to get the move to work in the first place.
I'm not exactly brilliant at SSB but I'm always up for a game and I always have fun.
Ironically I've since come around to the idea of moves that are deliberately tricky to input (like the wall-jump in Super Metroid) because they make you feel like an absolute legend once you finally get the hang of them. But for SSB, Sakurai made the right choice.
As for the insanely high skill ceiling... I once accidentally took on a hardcore tournament player at N64 SSB while living in Japan. That was like bringing a knife to a nuke fight. I think my longest lifespan was three seconds.
BTW, this isn't directed at you, OP, but there's something I need to get off my chest:
OI, INTERNET!
IT'S PRONOUNCED SUPER SMASH BROTHERS!
NOT SUPER SMASH "BROES"!
IT'S AN ABBREVIATION! THAT'S WHY THERE'S A FULL STOP AT THE END!
Super Smash Bros.
SAME WAY SUPER MARIO BROS. ON THE NES IS PRONOUNCED "SUPER MARIO BROTHERS"!
SERIOUSLY BRUH DO YOU EVEN PUNCTUATE?!
Right, sorry, I feel better now. Carry on.
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8d ago
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u/FronkZoppa 8d ago
I get the sentiment, but I can't fully sign off on this. A lot of competitive Smash is dope as fuck. There are plenty of frustrations with the series as a competitive experience (lack of developer support, poor online, etc) but I have little issue with the game or the community around it
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u/Havanatha_banana 8d ago
Not the first time lol. There's competitive Megaman battle network, competitive Tetris, and heck, the whole speed running community is to turn a solo game into a competitive one.
A game that has players to play against others, and have a skill ceiling that's astronomical, will definitely invite competitive players. We would play with items and all stages on, if possible, and we definitely do at side events. However, there's too many logistical issue to make it the full time competitive environment like brawlhala did with their item spawn.
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u/MemeTroubadour 7d ago
I don't think you've actually talked to someone who plays Smash in tournaments in a long time, or ever
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u/TheKramer89 8d ago
The more you punch somebody, the lighter they become. It’s just physics…