Masahiro Sakurai continues to be a treasure trove of information regarding the “Creating Games” series that he does. He breaks down everything in the gaming space, no matter how big or small. For example, in his latest video, he talked about hit animations. At first, that might not seem like a “meaningful topic,” as all you really have to do is ensure that you have a working animation, and you’d be done, right? But, true to his nature, he didn’t let that simple notion stop him from going all out for every single character within the game.
By that, we refer to how Sakurai states he handled the animations on a basic level and then built them up. For example, he states right off the bat that he wanted the hit animations to truly feel like the character was getting hurt. To have it almost be “exaggerated” so that players could see that a character was getting hurt. But after that, he noted that every single character in games like Super Smash Bros Brawl has a large amount of hit animations depending on the attacks or actions put against them.
In this case, there are nine animations just for the attacks themselves based on whether they get a little damage, some damage, or a lot of damage. Then, there are the “knockback” animations, which also vary depending on the impact and style. That means that, at minimum, every character had 12+ hit animations to be rendered for the game to look good.
But Masahiro Sakurai wasn’t done. He revealed another key element that highlighted how dedicated he was to this. As he noted in the video, not every character in the game had the same body type. In fact, plenty of characters had different body types to the others in one form or another. Even if they were human, they might have had something like weapons they carried, and that would throw off the similarities.
He even pointed out how other fighting games sometimes copy hit animations from one character to another because they’re all human and thus can relatively move in the same way. But he can’t do that with something like Super Smash Bros, given all the variances in body types and items they hold.
So Sakurai and his team had to put in work so that every hit animation read as something impactful yet unique to the character. Let this be a lesson: Sakurai doesn’t take anything lightly and wants every detail to shine.
