Smash Wii U What would you add/change about the Stage Builder?

[Creativion]

Let me point out first that I do not have the Wii U version of Smash, but I have been obsessed with the Stage Builder and have been watching videos on it about YouTube.

Stage Builder was one of my favourite features in Brawl, if not, it WAS my favourite. The new stage builder seems AWESOME! More Backgrounds, Platforms that you can DRAW, it's in HD, Oh my!!!!

However, there are some bad things about the stage builder I noticed from the videos, and what people have complained about. So, here are my ideas. Also, post what features you would add, change, or remove for your ideal stage builder!

Idea #1: Gigantic Stage Size

This stage size is the only one bigger than Large, and would be the only one to support 8 Player Smash. It would allow much more weight, but you would have to reach a certain amount of weight before you can save the stage. This idea came from the fact that some people were disappointed that 8 players can't use Custom Stages.

Idea #2: Move Tool, Re-size Tool, and Trim Tool

These are pretty self explanatory. The Move Tool can let you move around platforms after you drew them, I have seen complaints about the absence of this tool.

The Re-size Tool will either extend, shrink, or grow your platform that you already drew. This may be useful when you think your platform is a little bit too big, or to make it bigger for more room for fighters.

The Trim Tool is what most people said the eraser should do. This tool would make it so you can erase only certain parts of your platform. You can move it along to erase anywhere you draw.

Idea #3: New Items/Structures
These would go along with Springs, Cannons, Moving Platforms, and Magma.

Returning Brawl Items:
• Drop Block (The Block that falls down when fighters stand on it)
• Rolling Platforms (Has the new style of the platforms)
• Conveyors (2 Variations: Conveyor (slow) and Conveyor (fast))
• Spikes (These are like Magma, but they do not have to be inside platforms. The can be standalone. They also have 2 variations: Spikes (short) and Spike (tall))
• Ladder (What do you expect?)

New Items:
• Item Blocks, as seen in the Mushroomy Kingdom stage in Brawl. They regen an item every 30 seconds.
• Water (Works like Magma, but you can swim through it. You can still drown in it if you stay too long)

Any Ideas for more new items?

What are your ideas for the stage builder? Tell me what you would add, change, or remove about the stage builder!

 

[Nitric Acid]

I just wanted Brawl's stage builder back. Sucks not being able to replicate sweet stages such as GameXplain's Peach's Castle and Hyrule Castle from 64 just because I don't have a steady hand. Everything was so much easier with premade blocks...

 

[Alses]

Hm, everything you listed is pretty much all I'd ever want except for what is missing: ferris wheels with platforms like in Brawl, curved moving platforms even if their curve is a preset one, change the spawn areas for players and items and finally attaching lava or other hazards to a moving platform along with moving platforms that have edges to grab.

 

[Naoshi]

All of these sound great plus:

-Walls (Cave walls, tower bricks, etc etc). It would add a lot to the visuals of the stage you're building. As of now, the stage builder looks insanely barebones in the visual department. Having this would improve it tenfold.
-Ice (Can be drawn as a terrain like regular platforms or drawn on terrain like Magma)
-More level themes: Night City, Snowy Mountain, Cavern, Sci-Fi Hidden Base

I just wanted Brawl's stage builder back. Sucks not being able to replicate sweet stages such as GameXplain's Peach's Castle and Hyrule Castle from 64 just because I don't have a steady hand. Everything was so much easier with premade blocks...

Did you try the Grid and dotting the platforms' shape? It's extremely helpful.

 

[Nitric Acid]

Did you try the Grid and dotting the platforms' shape? It's extremely helpful.

I did, and it helped a little, but I suck at that too and the game pad is frustratingly unresponsive. In the end, I decided I don't want to spend hours trying to create something mediocre I can play locally with buddies instead of, you know, actually playing the game.

 

[Munomario777]

I just wanted Brawl's stage builder back. Sucks not being able to replicate sweet stages such as GameXplain's Peach's Castle and Hyrule Castle from 64 just because I don't have a steady hand. Everything was so much easier with premade blocks...

You can hit X to activate a grid and make blocks by tapping corners if you prefer doing it that way.

EDIT: 'd

Anyway, my list:
- Everything OP mentioned
- A second layer behind the playable one (so we can have caves with backdrops, things like Hyrule Castle, etc.)
- More textures, or at least have all the textures available on all of the backgrounds
- Removal of the weight limit, or at least a more generous one

 

[CrazyChaos]

Better grid snap. The stuff I draw with the grid on does not always snap to the grid very well. This is a problem for something like if I draw a block and I want a platform connected on the side of it. There will often be a gap between the block and platform. A very small gap that does not affect gameplay, as far as I am aware, but it looks pretty bad and it bothers me. I have to redraw it until it looks good enough and I will usually end up leaving an overlapping drawing of the same shape and texture. I dunno if anyone else has noticed this or can describe it better than me. It really bothers me about how inconsistent and seemingly random it is though.

Other than that, OP covers some good stuff. Especially the tools, but add copy and paste tools too.
Large is pretty large as it is. I am surprised that 8-player was not even allowed on those, considering it is allowed on the Brawl Fire Emblem stage which starts off on quite a small stage. There may be another reason preventing custom stages from being played with 8 players, but I would not know about that.
The option to change those moving platforms to one of the available textures would be nice as well.

 

[Munomario777]

Better grid snap. The stuff I draw with the grid on does not always snap to the grid very well. This is a problem for something like if I draw a block and I want a platform connected on the side of it. There will often be a gap between the block and platform. A very small gap that does not affect gameplay, as far as I am aware, but it looks pretty bad and it bothers me. I have to redraw it until it looks good enough and I will usually end up leaving an overlapping drawing of the same shape and texture. I dunno if anyone else has noticed this or can describe it better than me. It really bothers me about how inconsistent and seemingly random it is though.

Other than that, OP covers some good stuff. Especially the tools, but add copy and paste tools too.
Large is pretty large as it is. I am surprised that 8-player was not even allowed on those, considering it is allowed on the Brawl Fire Emblem stage which starts off on quite a small stage. There may be another reason preventing custom stages from being played with 8 players, but I would not know about that.
The option to change those moving platforms to one of the available textures would be nice as well.

On the subject of gaps between blocks, I believe the different textures vary in offsets or something. I was trying to make a Green Hill Zone stage, but with the checkerboard hill, there were gaps in between the two colors.

 

[SegaNintendoUbisoft]

Include the ability to draw your own textures.

 

[Hayzie]

Wii U's front-facing camera for snapping pictures of private parts. Then incorporating it into the game, auto-gen.

 

[GreenReaperGod]

How about being able to draw things in the background or foreground?

 

[Khao]

Background layer. You could draw **** just like you do in the current editor, except they'd be on the background, behind characters, with no collisions or any sort of interactivity. You know, just to be able to tweak visuals a little bit more.

Also, I really want the weight limit to be larger. Once you discover you can draw stuff above already-placed blocks to customize the looks a little bit further, you really start wanting more space for drawing stuff.

As for bringing stuff back, the only thing from Brawl's editor I feel are missing, is ice blocks, and falling platforms. Everything else can be easily recreated.

 

[Kashology]

I also want a block grid-snap option available. The drawing tool is great, but I lack the skills to keep a steady hand and doing the dots is too tedious. I sometimes want a set of blocks scattered across the map, and going four dots at a time for each block individually is too cumbersome, simply grabbing them from a list of items and dropping them in place duplo style is much more simple and effective.

And like the OP mentioned, I'd like a move, re-size, and duplicate tool as well. This would help so much, if I manged to make a nice piece but later decide it should be elsewhere on the map, smaller/bigger, or duplicated, it would sure save a lot of trouble from having to make it again. Lastly I also second, more items, more BGs, and a background layers (like jungle hijinks), but really I'd be already satisfied with just grid-snapping from a list of block items, move, duplicate, and re-size tools.

 

[9Blades]

I actually really like the stage builder as it is. I just really wish you could place individual blocks like in Brawl, including the different types of blocks in that.
I prefer the Brawl stage builder to this one

 

[Raijinken]

The trim tool mentioned would be the best thing. Also, some pre-made blocks for people who can't draw a straight line even with a snap tool.

 

[maxpower1227]

Move/resize/trim tools and extra items that were in the Brawl stage builder are all that are really needed. Some of these requests are really specific and only affect the cosmetics of the stage. That isn't as important as the actual layout and it's unrealistic to expect those to ever be added.

 

[LunarWingCloud]

-Option to use premade tiles.
-More special objects (Brawl had several based on the stage's background, 4 only has the 4 pairs of 2 items that are usable in any background, that's not really a lot...).
-Resize/Rotate option.

The ability to freely draw helps this Stage Builder a whole bunch, but a lot of the content outside of that is really lacking and Brawl had better. No ice-physics tiles? I can excuse the spike removal since lava is basically the same thing. No blocks that fall after standing on them? No windmills?

 

[leprechaunlink727]

It's nice that it was included, but it really does come off like an afterthought, even more than Brawl's editor, and needs a number of features before I would consider it any more than a throwaway bonus mode:

Spoiler

-All of the blocks/ stage elements you list in the OP, plus Ice Blocks, destructible blocks(like Skyworld, would be great if you could set HP limits), disappearing platforms (like Mega Man), the various Spiky things from Palutena's Temple, and I don't know, maybe fans like in Pokemon Stadium 2? It would also be cool if instead of just having "moving platforms", any platforms you create could be set to move in a preset pattern or rotate. Being able to set the speed of these would be nice. Flippers and bumpers would be great too. Imagine making a Pinball inspired stage with Bumpers everywhere. It would also be nice if we could choose the color of these elements so that they fit in better. Water and magma should be colorable as well, and really need to be reworked so that large pools are possible to create rather than just thin layers.

-Manipulation tools that were already in Brawl, like copy and paste, rotate, and flip. Tools for enlarging/shrinking pieces would be great too, and we really, really need the ability to click and drag already created platforms.

-Special pieces like tunnels, stairs, fences, rocks, and ferris wheels that were in Brawl. Basically bring back all of the Brawl pieces and add a few more, like trees and flowers. Again, being able to recolor these pieces to our liking would be nice.

-Rather than limiting most of the textures to certain themes, just let us have all of the damn textures for every stage. Who cares if the themes don't match, it would allow us to have much more visual variety, and I really don't understand why they've chosen to restrict us in this way yet again.

-Better yet, give us some solid colored textures to work with as well. Doesn't need to be anything ridiculously extensive, just ROYGBIV, pink, lime, brown, gray, black, white, gold, & silver. Again, this will give the stages a lot more visual variety and would be very, very simple to implement. Even more awesome would be a custom texture creator like the pattern creator in Animal Crossing, but I can understand how that could be a lot of work to implement.

-A background layer would be really clutch and would help things to look a lot nicer. More than anything else on this list, this would make the biggest difference for the visual quality of stages.

-Greatly expand the weight limit. If we want to eat up our SD card, that's our choice.

-Some more backgrounds. Bring back the three from Brawl, and give us at least 5-10 more on top of that. Obviously some visual variety would be nice: Jungle, Snowy, Desert, Casino, etc. It would be nice if some of these were actually inspired by series in the game rather than being generic, even if it's only one background per series. I guess it's too much to ask for us to be able to use the static stage backgrounds from the main stages or add platforms to Omega modes... This is another place where solid colors would be awesome for creating things like 8-bit/LCD/Gameboy inspired stages. If they really want to go above and beyond, they should just let us use pictures from our SD card or that we take with the camera on the gamepad. If they do this, they not only create infinite variety, but they leave most of the work up to us. Unlike a custom texture creator, I feel like this would be very simple to implement. Sure, some backgrounds would just be pictures of people's balls, but custom stages are already only allowed on With Friends, so what's really the harm?

-If you really want to gain the love of the fans, let us turn created stages into Break the Targets courses. We could just place 10 targets, set each one to be either static or move along a predetermined path, and then have to beat them before we can save them. Then we can share them online and Nintendo can share the best ones like they did with the Stage of the Day in Brawl. BAM, endless new single player content, generated with only minor extra work by Nintendo. The few Break the Targets courses in Brawl look like they were basically made with the Stage Builder anyways.

-Let us set 2-3 songs for each stage instead of just one. They don't need to have their own My Music page or anything, but a little variety goes a long way.

-If they want to go all out, they could bring in a lot more extra elements and hazards beyond those listed above. Tracks for minecarts, little shyguys that drive through at predetermined times on karts, Smash Run enemies with patrol routes, arwings, timed explosions and laser blasts, hazards that give status effects like metal or poison, tools for lighting a stage, the possibilities are endless. Things like this need only be included if Sakurai and his team really want to put in the time to create a robust and flexible editor for making stages with quality on par with the main ones. A limited editor with mostly static and generic pieces is fine too, but they've managed to kind of half-ass even that.

Right now, the editor is so limited that it feels like they're deliberately trying to keep us from getting too creative. It also feels like the editor was a feature thrown in at the last minute and left half-finished, as evidenced by its bugginess and distinct reduction in pieces from Brawl. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but with the state it's currently in, I would almost rather they not have included it at all. Despite the novelty of being able to draw platforms (which doesn't work as well as advertised), this editor is actually a big step down from Brawl's, and is easily the biggest disappointment of the game for me.

Other games with level editors nowadays tend to give players access to the same tools that the developers used to make the levels, like Little Big Planet, Modnation Racers, and any number of indie games like Super Meat Boy, Hotline Miami 2, or Gunpoint. Compared to those kinds of tools, the stage builder in Sm4sh can't help but feel like a joke. Furthermore, Smash Bros is the only fighting game series I know of that has introduced a level editor, meaning it's not something they had to include if they weren't interested in fleshing it out enough to make it worthwhile.

I think with extensive patches, the Stage Builder could be an amazing feature. I would gladly pay for a DLC focused solely on expanding the Stage Editor. While we can't really guess what future Smash DLC will look like, I don't think that Sakurai will prioritize patching the stage builder. But he should, because a fully-featured editor would allow players to fill gaps in the stage roster that they would otherwise expect to be filled with DLC, meaning a little bit of hard work on expanding the tool could save Sakurai a lot of hard work down the road. There's literally no downside to giving players robust tools for expanding your game with their own content, except perhaps inappropriate content, but there are already systems in place to limit exposure to that possibility and people can make ***** no matter how much you limit their tools. More and more, player created content seems like the wave of the future, just look at how Valve has made millions through adding player-created cosmetic items to TF2. But for some reason this is one area where Nintendo has always been pretty hesitant to provide more than the bare minimum.

Sorry for the rant, I have a lot of feelings.

 

[Dark Dude]

There are a lot of things I would love to see added to the stage builder. But there's one thing in particular that bugs me more than anything else. Fix the grid. You can see it perfectly fine on the tv, but you're not using the tv. You're using the gamepad. The grid is awful on the gamepad. I understand that it's an issue with the gamepad's resolution, but there has to be some sort of fix for this. I mean, I can rarely get the grid to even be fully visible. Most of the time, a lot of the lines are completely invisible. It makes counting squares annoying. Fix that, then work on other stuff. I can't believe they even released the game with the grid like that.

Another thing that annoys me is the option to make a ledge grabbable or not. Okay, it's cool to have that option, but it doesn't always give me the option. If I'm hand drawing the platforms, then a lot of the times it seems to think that I don't have a good enough angle for it to be grabbable, or something is wrong. So I have to redraw platforms over and over until I get a good enough angle that it will give me the option to make it grabbable. It should be a little more forgiving than that. Also, it makes it impossible to draw a thin platform between two corners because it forces you to go to the "grab / no grab" menu even if you're in the middle of drawing the platform. There's got to be a way to fix that, too.

I do like the move, resize and trim ideas, too. Definitely could use those.

 

[TheVoc]

A copy/paste feature as well as an undo/redo would smoothen the experience (instead of stopping your drawing, clicking the eraser, erasing, coming back, etc.).

More backgrounds would be appreciated. In the same light more textures, or even the ability to recolor/retool textures for platforms and such would be nice.

The abilty to make a stage support 8-Player Smash would be cool. I made one that had two boxed-in platforms with drop-thru ceilings that would definitely be big enough to support 8.

 

[Squadaloo]

Bug fixes to existing builder
1) Fix the grid on the gamepad: it's impossible to see correctly half of the time.
2) If you're in the process of drawing a platform, prevent ledge editing of other platforms. So many times, I've tried to add a drop-through platform next to a solid platform and it was nearly impossible because it thought I was trying to edit the corner of the solid platform even though I was clearly in the middle of trying to draw something.
3) Force blocks to be "layered" in the order that you drew them. It's so frustrating trying to add visual flair to your stage only to give up because sometimes when you draw on the front of another solid platform, it draws behind the original platform and sometimes it draws in front.
4) Sometimes, the game won't make a ledge grabbable when there's clearly enough round around it and the ledge is almost perfectly level. It's maddening.

Additions
1) Add more objects like ladders, water, danger zones, ice, and so on.
2) Add the ability to edit the existing geometry by moving it and tapping corners and dragging them. I hate having to redraw something because I need to edit one little bit.
3) Make stages sharable, but they're working on that so kind of a moot point.
4) Support 8-player Smash
5) Have the ability to draw in the foreground/background
6) This is honestly one of my biggest ones: add more themes based on pre-existing franchises. When people want to make the stage of their dreams, odds are it's based on one of the Nintendo franchises, like a Bowser's Castle level or a new Dreamland stage. Instead, we end up having to draw a generic grass platform and pretend it's something else. Now, I realize such an option would probably still be too limiting for some ideas, but at least let me draw a Mario grassland or a platform made of bricks and shingles so I can make Hyrule Castle or something. That way, the custom stages would fit more in with the rest of the game too.

Really, the builder needs help: If the one in Brawl was half-baked, this one feels like it never even made it to the oven.

 

[Codster]

I actually preferred Brawl's Stage Builder. I'm not that good at "drawing" stages.

 

[Dark Dude]

I actually preferred Brawl's Stage Builder. I'm not that good at "drawing" stages.

I'm not, either, which is why I try to use the grid. There's another idea, allow the player to customize the grid size. That will make it even easier for people who can't draw.

 

[leprechaunlink727]

One thing that I left out of my giant rant that others have mentioned is support for 8-player Smash. It's easy to get sick of having to go to the same few maps in this mode, and stage builder could be a great way of mixing things up. It could be that a certain amount of walkable terrain has to be generated before the builder will allow you to use it for eight player. In addition, the ability to manually place spawn points would be helpful as well for both 4-player and 8-player maps.

Who would be interested in compiling some of the better/more frequent suggestions in this thread and submitting them to Nintendo in some way? Otherwise we're just complaining into the internet void. I would do it, but it's finals week.

 

[GreenReaperGod]

This is just wishful thinking, but I have a few ideas.

It would be pretty cool to be able to great transforming stages like Castle Siege, where you construct three individual stages and set the time between transformation.

Same with moving stages. Just create a large stage and set the camera's movement and speed. It would allow us to create stages like Rainbow Cruise.


Also, how would we submit our ideas to Nintendo? I'd be willing to compile a list of additions and such.