ult character design, computer :)

2022 07 10

content warnings

we wrote this extremely quickly and didn't think about our words very much 🥺 it was a lot more important to write quickly and get all of our thoughts out as soon as possible, and we don't have interest in making our words better right now. it's okay :)

currently, a barrier to us is that we must be at the computer to write blogposts, and that we have a lot of thoughts and that writing takes a long time. it is frusterating how brain is speed of light but hand is speed of hands.

Ultimate

This is Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for the Nintendo Super.

Smash Ultimate is a fighting game, designed for platforming. Because it focuses on platforming, a lot of things work differently than expected!

compared to most 2D fighting games, you have a lot of precise control over your character in the air, and most movement is analog instead of digital. Back forward run are the same speed and hurtbox, very few characters have motion input specials or command normals, there is universal double jump and aerial combo break (common in anime fighters) and a bunch more is different.

Something we find very interesting, is how the game is balanced.

limited character design

in smash bros., unlike basically any other fighting game we can think of, characters are designed to fit into a universal template, and then diversified from there.

in guilty gear strive, characters are first given a design concept. certain move types have overlap in their usecases, but they feel a lot more purpose built. Pot's crouch HS is a slow anti air, and also meant as a nasty combo starter, since potemkin has a lot of high-hitting combo moves. Kyle's crouch HS is horrible as an anti air even if it has disjoint, and is mostly a combo move. Happy Chaos' crouch heavy slash makes them a worse character. They're all differently designed to fit the character!

Donkey Kong's up tilt is an disjointed arcing anti air that is minus on hit. Marth's up tilt is a disjointed arcing anti air that sometimes comboes, sometimes kills. Alex's up tilt is also a disjointed arcing combo up tilt, and it's fucking broken.

smash bros. characters are firstly designed around their template. We think this is incredibly strange given that this is a game that takes from very detailed source material and that should try to replicate a character's design and gameplay in smash bros. as effectively in their fighting style as possible.

it is also incredibly interesting how they distinguish characters from each other and balance them, as a result of this design limitation!

donkey kong is a grappler character that is fast and has good neutral moves, and that gets blown up by every character in the game. marth is a midrange zoner that heavily rewards good fundies with some bullshit added for good measure. Alex is a combo character with resource management and literal walling and a comboeing/killing command grab/projectile/burst option.

it is so cool how they achieve this!!!

a lot of smash bros. character diversity comes from special, character specific mechanics, and breaking the rules of what a template slot is for, and a characters' special moves.

characters often have their entire kit's range and frame data based on their special moves. Terry's specials are high damage and kill, so their normals lead into them. Samus's entire neutral is based around a active charge projectile special, and so her forward air is specialised as an air to air and her dash attack a burst option, and was given a long range grab for midrange pressure.

Terry is special here because they get to cancel their normals into specials (most comboes in smash bros. are natural comboes), samus is special because her grab is way longer range than most characters so she can play her game more effectively. these are examples of the smash bros. team wiggling in small diversity to try and make a moveset!

the smash bros. team saw that terry was from a normal fighting game and decided he deserved normal cancelling. They noticed that samus had a very large grappler in metroid and a charge projectile, so they took those and ran with them.

over time, the smash bros. team has gotten a lot better at designing characters outside of the template, so that they fit the character's source material. Terry's ability to cancel normals makes sense in their context, samus having her entire neutral designed around charge shot does not make sense for her, and she's far closer to a rushdown-explode-you kinda of character in metroid games than a zoner. Samus debuted in smash in 1999, and terry debuted in we think 2019.

the developers have gotten a lot better about designing characters around the character and not with the template. some of our favourite designed characters in the series are all from wii u and ultimate, the two most recent games.

in particular, we really like the design of the new characters that came with ultimate! so, not dlc. The dlc characters nearly all have something extreme that makes them difficult to talk about in the same way as the base game characters. we think our favourite are the belmonts :)

we love pasta.

switch remote play for drawing

we have been trying to get durian to connect to kitten system in order to draw in my paint! we think it would be more comfortable to have the program and main display be on kitten system and not durian because kitten system has higher resolution! we could also set up durian for our hand and also use keyboard commands!! yay!!

we have found this program, and it seems good. unfortunately, we have realised that we do not actually have a windows computer!!! oops. apparently it supports usb which would be useful because kitten system has poor signal connection with the internet ( most screen sharing programs use the internet, even locally).

we did realise that we could play guilty gear if we got it working! we could play it our non guilty gear locals and in bed :) we really really really like guilty gear. it makes us so happy

it's like pasta ^w^

pretty website ideas and desires

we've been using the marginalia search engine alot recently. it lets us find personal websites about certain topics. the search seems pretty poor at the moment but it does give us basically a random assortment of personal websites to explore regardless! even if unrelated to our search mostly.

we've found a lot of cool ones! we want to make a links page for stuff like the search engine and awesome stuff we found online. we even found cadence in one of the links sections for a cool site we found! awesome!

the websites we've been finding have made us really want to add colourful and pretty things onto our website !! cute blinkies, animations and colours, really awesome stuff. we dont know how to describe specifically what we want, we know it is a certain kind of look that we want. colourful calming and also high contrast shadows? hdr website. hdr elysia ☺️

our (brand new!!!) train site is our first test with this. we wanted it to be super pretty from the beginning :)

we have a toronto streetcar surfing poster behind our computer :) it has cute cats in it and is really pretty art.

friendly editors and computer

we think having friendly and cute ways to use the computer, "workflow," would help us a lot. sometimes kitten system extremely heavily triggers us when we are trying to be happy (sometimes related to physical environment) sometimes and it is really destructive.

it is overwhelming to find what we need to change and to do it, it's!! we think it is a lot more than usual that we are noticing all at once. we don't know.

regardless, it's overwhelming! we know that changing how we use her would be empowering and make us happy too.

we want to go to a café on a date with our partner :) (cannot stop thinking about this).

we are so happy that minecraft alex is in smash bros.. we love minecraft so fucking much we love it and we love how alex works in smash bros.. eeeeee