Fresh off a look at his hyper-functional gaming set-up last week, Smash Bros and Kirby creator Masahiro Sakurai has started a YouTube teaching game design.
And yes, he does appear to be filming his videos from his famous couch.
The channel, Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games, only went live yesterday, but he’s already uploaded three videos. The first, embedded above, explains the channel’s mission statement. The second takes viewers through Sakurai’s long history in game development, I think to establish his credentials. I mean, the guy created Kirby. That should be bona fides enough on its own.
The third video, embedded below, is Sakurai’s first real design lesson and is about the value of Stops to highlight important moments.
A Hit Stop is a feature you can see most clearly in Sakurai’s own Super Smash Bros Ultimate. When a player lands a heavy hit on an opponent, there are a few frames of animation after the hit connects where both the attacker and the opponent freeze or hover in the air. Once these frames end, movement resumes, and the fight continues. The freeze creates the illusion of force and the transfer of momentum. It may be hard for the eye to detect in the moment, but it feels good. It makes the hit feel that much harder.
Sakurai plays a clip of Ryu belting Captain Falcon with his Shoryuken move, both with and without the stop. The difference is clear: the version with the Hit Stop feels stronger, as though Ryu’s put his back into it. The version without the stop feels like Falcon is being trivially batted out of the way.
Sakurai points to a similar methodology with his Finish Zoom, a hard zoom-in on the final heavy strike that ends a match. Sakurai considers this a cousin to another effect he calls Boss Stop, designed to make the moment of defeating a final boss feel really good. He’s been using this effect since Kirby’s Adventure on the NES, and it’s served him very well indeed.
This effect is similar to what Jackie Chan would do when editing fights in his older movies. Retired YouTube film essayist Every Frame A Painting explained it quite well: Jackie and frequent collaborator Sammo Hung used a subtle editing trick to highlight a hefty hit and help the audience feel it. The trick was simple: they would cut from a medium shot to a close-up at the moment of impact. However, in the close-up, shot continuity would be slightly off. Jackie’s fist would be further back than it was in the medium shot, effectively showing the hit twice in the blink of an eye. The effect is pronounced: the eye reads it as a single hit, and it feels mighty.
Sakurai’s effectively been doing the same thing in his video games. Create the illusion of power by fooling the eye.
Anyway, if you’d like to subscribe to Sakurai on YouTube for more video game design wisdom, you can do so here.
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