Wario Wario Wario

Jimmy T.
When fabulous disco star Jimmy T. isn't busting moves on the dance floor, he's developing Microgames: short and frantic minigames you have to clear within an increasingly short time frame. He may seem like an odd character, but that's nothing compared to his co-workers: a taxi-driving dog and cat; a centuries-old alien; and samurai toddlers are among the fresh new faces making wild games under their powerful boss, the one and only - actually, let's wait for the official release to say who!

FUTURE RELEASE

I really hope developing my game will be as fun as conceptualising it has been.

Recently I decided I wanted my game's universe to have reverse cartoon dimorphism (basically, imagine all the women look like EarthBound characters, and all the men look like Pokémon characters) - but then I realised: I already had the design for my protag, and he's a cartoonish boy! So you know what I did?

Bam! She's a girl now, just needed eyelashes and longer hair on the front - also sleeves. I can't remember why I put in the sleeves. (This design is 100% not final BTW, I want to give her a stronger silhouette) But the thing is: I already had his name - Daniel - and that's not a very feminine name! But then inspiration struck from the most stupid possible place: the original version of Caillou was a baby and when they aged him up for TV they kept him bald because it was impossible to imagine him with hair

and now Caillou is iconic as "the bald cartoon boy", so naturally Daniel can become iconic as "the mermaid platformer mascot with a male name" because of an odd holdover

Now, the game's previous working title, the embarassing borderline-parody "Bodacious Dude Daniel" became a problem because, well, "Dude" is in it. I evaluated multiple title options and settled on "Daniel's Peculiar Tail"

It seemed like a title that could've actually been given to a 90s game and not a parody; I felt a "Name the Species" title only really works if they're a relatively obscure animal (hedgehog, bandicoot) and have a descriptive name; (supersonic speed, crashing into boxes) and while "tail" is refering to Daniel's fin as well as a story in this context I hoped it'd create positive subconcious associations with Sonic's buddy Tails given my only real target audience (I don't believe in target audiences TBH, but there's certainly people who will like my game more than others) is fans of 2D Sonic disillusioned by 3D outings, especially the "Adventure" and "Dark" Eras which notably downplayed Tails' sidekick role as they went on.

PlayStation All-Stars is often said to be a victim of bad timing - which is true, but not just in the roster sense. PSASBR was very clearly made by passionate Smash fans, pretty much everything a casual player would conciously love about about 64 though Brawl is there: the engine feels good, the roster is incredible for a first instalment even without triangle-breasted treasure hunters or mutated marsupials, and there's a lot of genuinely clever moves and gameplay additions. The problem was that Smash, from a gameplay level, wasn't fully understood by anyone other than the devs and competitive players at the time - and even then competitive players were still fooling around on Poké Floats and Rainbow Cruise at the time

If you were trying to distinguish your platform fighter from Smash without any knowledge of competitive play or the games' internal mechanics, your first thought wouldn't be air grabs or removing blocks, it'd be changing how you kill. PSASBR tried having super meters that were the only way to kill - a fun concept on paper that probably could've worked in a more simple genre, but fighting games - trad or plat - are inherently complex, and PSASBR's super meter punishes careful thought. PaRappa's neutral circle, a command grab and parody of Mortal Kombat's "Get Over Here!" using a microphone is extremely easy to spam as it can be cancelled into itself. That'd be bad enough in a Smash game, but at the very least in Smash the hip hop hero would actually need to kill using strong moves - in PSASBR, you just have to wait to hit Level 2 (PaRappa's level 1 is harder to pull off than rest) and with a now-disgraced voice actor's cry of "My skateboard NEEEEEEEEVER stops!" you've won the match before you can say "I gotta believe!" Ratchet is a braindead trapper who fills the screen with projectiles with no thought, Big Daddy and Afro-form Toro the Sony Cat's down strongs over-compensate for their slow speed with power and XP gain, and don't even get me started on Kratos

Rivals of Aether came out a bit later, when competitive Smash was better understood and more mainstream, and I'd say it layed the groundworks for platform fighters in future even more than Smash did. It wasn't afraid of comparisons to it's influence, but differentiated itself in small ways even casual fans would recognise once they played. Now we know that throwing foes off the stage is as essential to platform fighters as stamina bars are to traditional fighters - platform fighters are fighters, yes, but they're also platformers, and platformers are all about mobility. Recovering back to stage tasks mobility, and therefore is an essential part of the genre. I personally hope future platform fighters can find fun ways to vary the launching off-stage aspect - Nickelodeon's divisive rock-paper-scissors mechanic feels like it could do this to a small extent in practice by basically making strong airs anti-spikes - but either way it shouldn't be cut unless you're going exclusively casual, and in that case you may want to simplify your game a little. Shovel Knight Showdown is a really good example of a casual-only platform fighter because it doesn't pretend to have depth and has a unique gimmick that actively makes it better casually but also makes it very clear it doesn't have any hidden depth - small, non-unified movesets.

If PSASBR was made today by the same team and helped by better higher ups, it would've been phenomenal, possibly a legit Smash rival if they could get all or most of the characters they wanted. There are so many competitive Smash resources and game design analysises to sink your teeth into now that even someone who can't tell a wavedash from a waveland could make a passable platform fighter if they just spent a few months researching - PSASBR only really had a casual understanding of Smash and the vast but tangentially related world of traditional fighters to go off of.

Either way, the future for platform fighters is bright - even if (or possibly because!) Smash may or may not take a 10 year hiatus. Rivals' custom characters in particular give me hope. There are so many well-designed characters and stages there and I would happily buy a whole game made by devs with Workshop experience.