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Custom Stages

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Aug 6, 2008
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First off, this is placed in here since this forum is a high traffic area while Brawl Stages is not. The other reason is because this is very much related to metagame data as I wish to be collecting some.

Anyway, I am interesting in hearing about any tournaments that people have been in that ran custom stages and how it went.

-What issues were present with the stages, but what worked well?
-Do you have any tournament results to show with it?
-Was the tournament run with a more traditional ruleset? One you might find on the Unity Ruleset or the Recommended Ruleset. Or was the tournament more like a local gamestop tourney which may have odd rules like Wolf Fsmash was banned from use.
-Post the stage design if you have it or try describing it.
-If you were in a tournament with custom stages did they continue to run them or not? Why did they stop if they were used.
-How do you feel about custom stages? Would you prefer to only use the regular stages. Or maybe the stagelists are fine once the proper stages were chosen and custom isn't needed.
 

#HBC | Joker

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When I first started looking into the Brawl scene, I was really suprised that there were no universally used Custom stages. I mean, the most popular stages in the game are FD, BF and SV. They're basically just flat stages, some with platforms. Making different configurations of simple **** like that would be easy and effective at adding variety without bull**** like Halberd's hazards or Frigate's flipping. I feel like the stage builder is one of the best things they added in Brawl and nobody uses it except to troll :p
 

TreK

Is "that guy"
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I tried to get the French people to look into it twice. The first try was quite successful, but the second one was a big fail : people considered the game was too old to make such a change. Even if it's a good one, people don't want to learn how to play all over again.

This still is one of my favorite topics. I'd love to have feedback from someone who played in a tourney with customs.
 
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I'll just have to make a side tourney with custom stages. Free entry, but 10 or 20 dollars on the line for first.
Yo xey, just gonna leave this here for ya so you can check it out.

http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=264481

I still haven't played in any custom stages yet in a tourney, but I would love to.
Thanks. Different ideas to look into.
When I first started looking into the Brawl scene, I was really suprised that there were no universally used Custom stages. I mean, the most popular stages in the game are FD, BF and SV. They're basically just flat stages, some with platforms. Making different configurations of simple **** like that would be easy and effective at adding variety without bull**** like Halberd's hazards or Frigate's flipping. I feel like the stage builder is one of the best things they added in Brawl and nobody uses it except to troll :p
Custom stages have issues from what I expect. Getting the death boundary right is interesting. To have a normal ceiling, the stage has to be super high from the bottom. Gliding or Snake's C4 recovery I feel could be an issue with that. Most of the builder items cannot be used since they probably add too much jank. Also, the platform heights are very annoying to deal with as well. Either too high or too low.
I tried to get the French people to look into it twice. The first try was quite successful, but the second one was a big fail : people considered the game was too old to make such a change. Even if it's a good one, people don't want to learn how to play all over again.

This still is one of my favorite topics. I'd love to have feedback from someone who played in a tourney with customs.
Do you have any more feedback regarding this?
 

#HBC | Joker

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I never really got the whole "snake's C4 recovery" arguement. I mean, yeah he can avoid gimps, but how often are you gonna gimp snake, honestly? And in general when snake is at his death %, hitting himself with C4 seems just as likely to kill him as it is to save him. So snake's recovery got a little better? It's ****ing snake, and he was gonna live forever anyway. I feel like it's a minor CP quality at best.

And gliding under the stage is a problem? Guess we better ban smashville then. Besides, if you build some blocks under your stage, you can make a wal that's a bit more of a pain in the *** to glide around. Again, I feel like this is a minor CP quality.

I'll give you the platform heights being really annoying sometimes, but eh. It's not always ideal but I'll work with what I've got. If you just keep your stage designs simple, it's suprising how much fun they can be. Most of the smash community just secretly wants to play on only three stages, so they make weak *** excuses for not allowing new stages to be introduced.
 
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I'm taking a huge guess and saying the community overwhelming prefers stage to minimally impact their matches. Smash64 stage list is pretty much Hyrule and dreamland. Melee is FoD, FD, BF, DL, YS, and PS1 as a counter; which all have slight variations on a battlefield design. And the Brawl stagelist and acceptance is very much on its way to doing what melee has. And most people do prefer to play on only neutrals. So, when coming up with custom stages there are a lot of things that people will complain about or abuse eventually. Stalling, platform camping, lack of edges, etc. are things ever stage will have to be built in mind. And in the end lots of custom stages are no longer really useable.

I saw glide as an issue because I was thinking with large undersides, Pit or MK could waste a huge amount of time down there by gliding all the way down, then all the way back up again. Although, I would have to see if they have different horizontal speeds when moving up and down as opposed to if they are not gliding straight up and down. If the time spent in the air is not different, then it makes no difference at all. Not sure about building a deep wall at the underside. I believe you can glide off of it forever pretty much by going down and back up again. Like do that for about 1-3 times, then come up the other side. Snake I loosely thought there might possibly be an issue with stalling for him. Pretty stupid, but I'm just trying to think of all possible problems a custom stage might run into with using.

Another problem with most custom stages I have seen are they put up too many platforms or put them high up off the stage. A large stage with high platforms makes it incredibly easy for platform camping. Having one stage like that would be okay in a list as a CP or neutral perhaps, but not a whole list of them.

But in the end, I've not run anything nor heard much feedback regarding how certain stages worked out. So its all guess work.
 

#HBC | Joker

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This talk of Custom Stages actually made me wanna go back and tweak some of my old designs. I playtested them a little vs CPUs and I think I've got the blastzones all pretty balanced. I've got about 6 or 7 designs that I think would be pretty legit, so next time I play with people I'll playtest them more thoroughly and let ya know how that goes.
 

TreK

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Do you have any more feedback regarding this?
Well I'll try to remember some stuff we discussed already.

1) It was generally agreed that if we made a custom stage, it would be a new starter which would act as a replacement of either Lylat Cruise (if it's a starter in your region), Yoshi's Island or Pokémon Stadium 1 in a 5 starters ruleset. The reason being : there is no need for a new CP, but there is a need for a starter since starters are usually considered as counterpicks against MK. It would make the dude less 'over the top' and stop most of the banning tendencies we have always had in France xD

2) Hacking issues are not such a problem in France, so we had no reason not to use the Stage Studio which basically gives us more possibilities in designing a stage (we can make PS1-like pillars if we don't want MK to scrooge, we can make blocs overlay which allows for kool stuff, have a 252 blocks limit instead of 50, and choose the spawns, in example...). Stages made that way, even if they are not 'valid', are not considered to be hacking by the wii. They work on any unhacked wii. We decided to keep it minimal though, because we want our scene to be as globally appealing as possible and since hacking is indeed a taboo in other countries, we didn't want to alienate ourselves.

3) We chose to be really careful with our stages. Every block had to have a purpose. It goes from obvious stuff like 'no walkoffs, no walls, no cave of life' to 'the background can change olimar's pikmin distribution and it can make or break him in some matchups', and 'is the stage itself where I want it to be : low enough so spikes still kill snake, high enough so DDD isn't broken, near the side boundaries just the right amount', ...

4) There are a couple glitches we have to be aware of with the stage builder and the stage studio. Here are those I kept a screenshot of :

You can go through the solid block if this configuration is used. Considering that MK's halberd exploit is banned, I'm pretty sure this would make the stage instant-ban.


With the stage studio, you can do this. And it makes it so that side of the stage has got two ledges. If you try to do any getup movement out of the lower one, you will be pushed back offstage instantly.


If you intend to do a PS1-like pillar, use ice blocks because else each block that is out of the boundaries will have a ledge.


If you overlay those two blocks, the square block will only have a ledge on its left. I couldn't get the mirror version of this to work : if you turn it around the block will have both its ledges.

No photos for this :
-If you try to overlay some platforms to get a custom-sized one, you may have collision glitches which will stop rolls, dashes, and dash attacks.
-If you want to place an horizontally moving platform in the floor, the same glitches may occur.
Both these situation are really hard to predict and stop the flow of the match greatly. I do not advise to use them.

5) We have tested a handful of stages already.
-One of them was a flat stage with two blocks high in the air which would be a micro cave of life that wouldn't 'randomly' get you saved. You would have to conquer a small zone in the middle where if hit horizontally you would be able to DI towards one of them and attempt to tech. All of this would take actual skill and that was the idea behind it. The full blocks provided additional, harder to reach ledges which would encourage poor recoveries and upBs from the floor. We discarded it because it provided ledges facing the inside of the stage which would make the air camping risk/reward ratio be really low.
And was called 'Smiley' because of how the blocks mimicked eyes and the stage mimicked a mouth. Kinda like :| but turned 90° clockwise.
-Another one was a flat stage with platforms above both of its ledges which would allow for different recovery routes and edgeguarding waypoints. It wasn't that bad, it's like whenever you were offstage, the smashville platform teleported above your ledge. Besides that, the stage didn't bring anything that FD didn't do better so we figured out it would be wise to look for something else. Iirc, it was called 'Smashvillage'.
-Yet another one, which required the stage studio to be used, was a flat stage with two medium moving platform rising out of the floor alternatively on both sides of the stage (with a 1 block offset from both ledges so the rising platform wouldn't make the ledge 'disapear' when they overlay with it). It was quite cool besides the fact that it would stop some CGs (which isn't such a disadvantage). We added a pillar to prevent scrooging just in case. It was called 'Mr.T' due to the T shape of the stage and the Mr.R-like stuff you could perform on it.

I'll add stuff if I remember anything else, but that's it for now.
 
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