There are certain things in video game development that you don’t think about until it’s brought to your attention. Masahiro Sakurai has been unveiling some of these aspects in his “Creating Games” series and diving into details about what makes these components or designs so important. He broke down one such “relatively unknown topic” for his latest video. Specifically, he discussed how he worked on blending all the characters together for the Super Smash Bros franchise to make it a cohesive visual experience. At first, that might not sound like a lot of work, but it was a very detailed process.
As he notes at the beginning of the video, the various characters comprising the Super Smash Bros roster are from different worlds and visual styles. If you compare someone like Bayonetta to Isabelle, you can see the various differences in their visual style, color palette, proportions, and more. Then when you add in characters like Ganondorf, Bowser, Kirby, Zero Suit Samus, Solid Snake, and so on, the styles continue to clash.
So how did Sakurai overcome this? The answer is that he took several steps with his team to help unify every character under one overall style.
For example, he lowered the saturation of the character’s colors so they could blend in while also playing well with the lighting. The second step was about the character’s textures. Many characters, like, say, Sonic or Mario, don’t have textures on their outfits in their mainline games because they don’t need them. But in Super Smash Bros, they were given some textures to reflect how they would be in another world. In contrast, Sakurai also lessened the textures and details on characters like Samus Aran as it helped blend things in more.
A key thing they did that many have noticed over the years was character proportions. The heights of the roster characters are much different from how they are in their original titles. Characters like Kirby had to be made much bigger, while Bayonetta had to be shrunk a bit. These changes all helped make their scaling feel more comparable to other characters.
Sakurai also wasn’t afraid to refine certain character designs to make them pop more in the fighting titles, with Captain Olimar being a great example of that. Finally, with characters like Yoshi and Donkey Kong, Sakurai ensured that they had realistic ways of doing certain things, such as closing their eyes in a non-cartoonish way.
All these efforts improved the games, and we should be grateful for that.
