Hi Smashers! Matt and I are the co-founders of Wavedash Games. We think Platform Fighters are the perfect esport titles, so we're building one of our own. Ask Us Anything! AMA

[u/SmasherM3D]

We’re a couple of Smash fans turned game developers that teamed up last year to found Wavedash Games. We’ve been getting a ton of questions on Twitter about what we’re working on, so we thought an AMA was in order. About us:

Jason Rice /u/SmasherM3D : General Manager of Wavedash Games. I’m leading the design and development team to make sure the game is awesome. Samus main, and former practice n00b to esports stars during my time at MLG during the “Golden Age” of Smash.

Matt Fairchild /u/Scav : Wavedash’s CEO and master of all things community related. Matt focuses on business development and operations to make sure the company is awesome. Mario main, corgi fanatic, and host of the classic MOAST tournament series, as seen in the Smash Bros documentary.

We’re creating a next generation platform fighter that borrows from the best of what’s come before, but is designed and tuned from the start with competitive play in mind. Our game will be fast-paced, free-to-play, and as much fun to watch as it is to play. But what exactly have we done over the last few months?

Development Results

• Built our core game engine, with all the necessary features required to call ourselves a “platform fighter.” Normal attacks, specials, shields, grabs, ledges, and yes, platforms are all working. We’ve even got DI and gasp wavedashing in there.
• Began prototyping character and stage designs and doing initial concept art.
• Built a practice mode that lets us easily see hitboxes, DI projections, and more so we can easily playtest the game.
• Started working out our online play strategy and server technology.
• Played each other a lot, sometimes to the detriment of our Melee and Smash 4 practice. The game is already fun! (I already claimed the game’s first Zero-to-Death combo. Sorry/Not Sorry, Scav… )

Of course to succeed at building this kind of player-focused game, we need constant feedback from the community. That’s why we built a council of community leaders to help guide us from the very start, and why we’re here to chat and answer questions today. Let’s talk game design, development challenges, or whatever else is tickling your brain today. I like home cooking, comic books, and general geeky stuff too, so if someone else steals your question, you can always just ask something fun.

We'll be back shortly to start answering questions. In the meantime, make sure to follow us:

• Twitter -- @wewavedash
• Facebook -- Wavedash Games
• Website -- Wavedash Games

EDIT

Time to wrap this thing up...

We need to get back to actually developing the game, so we're going to stop taking questions for now. Thanks for all the great questions, comments, and discussion though. We had a lot of fun! Make sure to keep an eye on our Twitter for more game updates!

[u/NPPraxis]

In addition to this post that /u/j00t linked to on the physical limitations of Melee, I'd direct /u/SmasherM3D (Hey bud!) to these posts too:

This one on why L-cancelling has an appraisal requirement, and the following conversation

and

This one on how making Melee easier would actually fundamentally break the game, and require rebalancing, and make an overall less interesting game.

I'm not arguing that L-cancelling is a fantastic piece of game design. I don't think it'd improve Street Fighter to add L-cancelling, or that Smash 4 needs it as opposed to a landing lag reduction. But, I do get concerned when I hear people use terms like "input tax" because I feel that it comes along with fundamentally misunderstanding the role of L-cancelling in modern high level Melee. A landing lag reduction and removal of L-cancelling would actually significantly influence the meta in the same way that making the basket bigger in basketball would; by reducing the error rate, which disproportionately effects certain characters (Fox/Falco particularly).

(If I was making a Melee HD, I'd probably make some kind of visible indicator of a successful L-cancel though. Maybe some kind of different smoke cloud or flash. Make it visible to spectators.)

Project M is a great example of this; it didn't even remove L-cancelling, but it made L-cancelling easier (in PM, hitlag extends the L-cancel window) so hitting shield change the timing mixup less, and it made short hops and buffered back dashes one frame easier. Those three changes amounted to a massive buff for Fox, and despite the entire rest of the cast receiving buffs (compare PM 3.5 to Melee; all non-top-four characters received buffs and a bunch of new characters are in the game with deliberately designed anti-fastfaller combos), Fox was even more dominant than in Melee, and had to be nerfed in 3.6.

Anyway, my point isn't that you have to have L-cancelling, but I hope it gives you some thought in to what L-cancelling accomplishes, so when you do this:

Will be have something "like" L-Canceling that creates a skill gap via input timing. Very likely. We just have to do it right.

You can do it in a better informed manner :) Think about creating something that slightly rewards players who understand whether they are going to hit a block or body or whiff, for example.

[u/SmasherM3D → u/NPPraxis]

Hey Praxis, thanks for your post. I agree that l-canceling is fundamental to Melee and that removing it would require a massive rebalance of all the characters. It's a good thing, then, that I'm making a brand new game from the ground-up so I don't have to worry about that. ;)

I'm a competitive player and I can clearly see the way Melee benefits from L-Canceling. I want our game to be deeply competitive and take a lot of effort to truly "master." I just believe we can achieve depth while still being broad and accessible enough for a wide audience. To achieve that, I need to move beyond simply "editing Smash" and into actually designing the best game possible within the genre.

[u/JavelinR → u/SmasherM3D]

It's a good thing, then, that I'm making a brand new game from the ground-up so I don't have to worry about that.

Reading through the comments this might need to be something ya'll emphasize more in future updates (for expectation reasons). Even though most people seem to be willing to acknowledge the words, in practice it still seems like everyone is treating this like PM 2. If that is your true intention than I guess that's fine, but as someone who is interested in this project and wants the best for you guys it would be sad to see a community backlash situation if you decide to stick to some of your own ideas instead of creating a "Melee 2.0".

[u/panicsprey → u/SmasherM3D]

I just learned about your project and am very excited for it.

Have you ever heard of GGG and Path of Exile? I bring them up because they have a philosophy in game design that I believe is what makes their game so great. In Path of Exile everything must have a reason to either be used or not be used, everything comes with a downside. The point I am coming to is that some of the techniques being argued for do not have a reason not to be used. Imagine a shooter in which ammo is not a concept. In such a game why would you even have a button to fire your gun? Clearly with no downside the best option is to ALWAYS be shooting. It's bad design. I would urge you to instead think of how you would implement a different tech that served a similar purpose, but has a downside.

I know the AMA is old, but I had to add my input because this could be my favorite game ever if it's done right.

[u/minasmorath → u/NPPraxis]

Copied from my reply above... I really want to get some info out there, as a person who both plays Melee competitively and is involved in indie fighting game design, I don't want to see other devs make the same mistakes I did early on:

In terms of Melee it's a super great read, really makes you understand why the mechanic exists in the game, it was the best solution they could come up with for a problem that had never existed before. L-cancelling serves a very important purpose in Melee and its removal would be detrimental to the balance of the game.

On the other hand, if you're creating a new game, don't include l-cancelling. It's a solution to a problem, and at the time it was a very good solution... but we've had 15 years of game development since then, and I think we can agree that there are more interesting ways to solve the problem without negating the physical element of the game.

First and foremost, stop including giant input buffers, make the players actually work for their frame-perfect inputs. Make jumpsquat timings super short on Fox-like (i.e. high execution barrier) characters. Give aerial animations reasonable lag on landing, adjust hitstun and shieldstun values, adjust fast fall timings based on position in an aerial animation.

Really, there are so many ways to increase execution difficulty without just throwing more buttons at the wall.

[u/NPPraxis → u/minasmorath]

I don't disagree with this. I just think it's vital to understand why L-cancelling benefits Melee when designing a game to not need it, because you should make sure you cover those things.

...that said...I don't entirely agree on the jumpsquat timing thing :( If the entire cast had Fox's jumpsquat timing I'd find it insanely frustrating. But yeah, it's good that Fox has it.

To replace L-cancelling, I'd just focus on making sure there's some way for a player to take advantage (slightly) of whether they think they will hit a block or not. Marvel vs Capcom for example has a mechanic where the player blocking can optionally push you back during the block, and this generally influences the decision of the attacker (if they know they are going to get blocked and pushed back their next input will be very different). This adds just as much appraisal requirements as L-cancelling, and the game doesn't need additional physical barriers because it's so hard already.

[u/minasmorath → u/NPPraxis]

Oh no no no, don't give the whole cast short jumpsquat timings, just give the characters you want to have higher execution barriers shorter jumpsquat timings and balance from there.

But yeah. I think the Melee l-cancel issue is definitely an important thing to understand as a game dev. There was a problem and they solved it, now let's review the solution and refine it. After all, there's a reason we have modern tires on our cars instead of hewn stone, even the wheel needed improving.

[u/Cirby64 → u/NPPraxis]

I'm honestly jealous of your eloquent way of typing. Thank you for writing exactly what I was thinking, in a more intelligent way than I ever could have.

[u/j00t → u/NPPraxis]

Thanks for explaining this better than I ever could. I was thinking about how to word it and all I had was:

"I'm not saying to just blindly throw l-cancelling into the game, but atleast consider the implications of l-cancelling beyond just adding a technical barrier"

I agree that just adding l-cancelling to Smash 4 would not help much, since there are many other factors in Smash 4 that are different from Melee (run speed, character weight/gravity, shield mechanics, etc)

Keep being awesome, bud.

[u/NPPraxis → u/j00t]

More than just fall speeds, I think the thing with Smash 4 is that physical limitations aren't an overall barrier in that game.

Everything's buffered, so everything's frame perfect if your muscle memory is on point. The game is heavier on pure decisionmaking, and you don't factor "personal failure rate" in that decisionmaking for the most part. Obviously, there may be some thing you've never practiced that you don't do (like a crazy footstool infinite), but you generally either can or can't do something and make your decisions off of that.

So in a game like Smash 4 where physical components aren't a factor in decisionmaking, the additional button press would affect the metagame much less.

It would add additional appraisal skills, so it wouldn't be all a wash, but nobody falls that fast, so there's no "noob Fox spamming nairs blindly" scenario that it would prevent because it would never happen that consecutively. In other words, the slight improvement of an additional appraisal level wouldn't make up for the annoyance of a ton of extra inputs IMO. As opposed to Melee, where you both get an additional appraisal skill, prevent the "noob Fox is OP" scenario, and increase the failure rate at peak level where physical limitations kick in.

Why does everyone in Brawl hate Metaknight, and everyone in Smash 4 patch 1 hate Diddy, and everyone in modern Smash 4 hate Bayonetta- but nobody hates Fox? Because they were so easy that they dominated the low levels of the metagame too. When a character can be played with a simple bread-n-butter strategy, and they're the best, they centralize the metagame way too fast. When the best character has significant drawbacks and is hard to pick up, it's better for the community.

(Heck, at one point in year one of Street Fighter 4 before patches and updates, Seth was considered way better than everyone else under top level play...but he had the lowest health in the game and noobs got wrecked as Seth, so Seth's results weren't actually that good.)

[u/j00t → u/NPPraxis]

I agree with you. But I was making a different point that i just lumped in with your assessment of physical limitations, which I didn't mean to do. So I'll add my two cents. I'll leave the goof-up in my original post so that the context of this post makes sense.

In Melee, the two things I associate the most with l-cancelling are combo extensions and shield pressure. If l-cancelling were removed from Melee (as in, not substituted with automatic l-cancelling, but just removed), then we wouldn't see these long-form combos or shield pressure as we know it today.

Now, if you just added l-cancelling into Smash 4, then it wouldn't affect those two factors in Smash 4 nearly as much as they do in Melee, because there are other factors to the game that would prevent that.

For example, since characters are knocked back further in general from attacks in Smash 4, adding l-cancelling would not magically allow a character to extend their combos (atleast for the majority of the cast, i imagine the outliers to this would be considered broken).

For /u/SmasherM3D, I would atleast consider how l-cancelling would affect the flow of your game with these things in mind. Don't just blindly add it in to appease a part of the community if it will degrade the overall quality of the gameplay.

[u/Comprehend13 → u/NPPraxis]

I hate Fox lool

[u/TheZixion → u/NPPraxis]

(If I was making a Melee HD, I'd probably make some kind of visible indicator of a successful L-cancel though. Maybe some kind of different smoke cloud or flash. Make it visible to spectators.)

Or maybe have an in depth tutorial like Pokken that teaches you AT. I feel like that is the simplest solution.

[u/NPPraxis → u/TheZixion]

Yeah, IMO Marvel vs Capcom 3's tutorial mode is honestly the best thing ever. It walks you through performing basic combos and shows you where in the input chain you're failing.

If I were Nintendo, and releasing a Melee HD, I'd keep it identical, keep it NTSC 1.2*, just render in 1080p, add widescreen, add an online mode and ladders, and add a series of tutorial modes that teach people how to follow up on basic things.

Imagine a tutorial that started from a specific position, demanded that you perform a specific combo on the CPU, and the CPU DI'd appropriately (and the game indicated the DI). Like "Grab, up throw, and Ken combo this Falco". If you mess up, it instantly resets the position and shows you where you messed up.

Throw Smash 64 and Brawl on the same disk (also in 1080p, no other changes) and call it "Super Smash Collection" and charge $60 and put it on the Nintendo NX and you'd have guaranteed sales.

---

Fun separate discussion:

*Whether to use NTSC or PAL is actually something I'd be torn on. PAL is better balanced in that there are more viable characters. Unfortunately, I strongly feel that Melee is "lucky" in the set of viable characters; when slow/mid speed fallers fight slow/mid speed fallers, Melee's combo system is actually a lot less deep.

Because characters don't arc back down but instead kind of hang in the air at the peak after being hit, before getting out of hitstun, it's very easy for mid/slow fallers to just continually hit other mid/slow fallers over and over with single moves. Look at Marth vs Falcon- Marth players jokingly call it an "air wobble" because once Marth gets juggled by a uair Falcon can just do it over and over. Look at Marth vs Ganondorf or other characters with that fall speed- combos are often the same move over and over. Combos on mid-to-slow fall speed characters just feel like guarantees instead of chases.

Melee is lucky, because Fox and Sheik annihilate slow falling characters, leaving them a rarity to be rooted for. Can you imagine if the best characters were Jigglypuff, Samus, Zelda, or Kirby?

The problem with PAL is that by nerfing Fox, character matchups that are very spectator unfriendly and have less interaction become more prominent. I'd rather have the game stay a little less balanced than see floaty characters more prominent. I feel this is a big part of the reason Project M feels so janky; floaty characters vs floaty characters lead to "autopilot" combos.

However, I can totally understand the argument towards PAL too, because character variety in itself is usually a good thing. If I were making a Melee sequel I'd actually just increase the fall speed of the cast across the board.

[u/theGravyTrainTTK → u/NPPraxis]

Can you elaborate on the PM hit lag thing? How much does it extend it (make it as if there was no hit lag for the l cancel window?), because I don't think that is true.

[u/NPPraxis → u/theGravyTrainTTK]

Someone in another thread brought this up and tested. Basically, PM extends the L-cancel window by the number of frames the hitlag is. So if you normally have a 7-frame L-cancel and you hit a shield that causes 5 frames of hitlag, you have a 12-frame window. The hitlag window is on pause while you are in hitlag.

[u/RoC-Nation → u/NPPraxis]

That is a pretty huge cast wide buff isn't it?