behemoth
Smash Journeyman
As far as to what my experience with making games is, I've been programming games (from breakout on my mom's 386 to elementary sidescrollers to the commercial-level fps I'm working on now) since I was 8. And I've always been a student of good video games.
A trend that is generally noticeable to anyone who has tried to balance a game is that most balancing done by game studios falls into one of two styles:
The first is more expensive, and more chancy. You test the hell out of the game, and make sure that every possible move (if your testers are good enough) has a counter. Don't worry about "broken", just make sure that there is a counter. I say this is chancy because you are betting on two things: First, that your testers are good enough; second, that this balance still leaves distinction between characters/weapons.
The second route, and this is the one I believe Sakurai followed, is cheaper and far more shallow, and not nearly as chancy. In this approach, you basically envision your players' strategies and either decide to make them valid or invalid through your balancing choices. In this route, you know how the player will play because you can essentially make it the only viable way to play.
What the second approach does is create an intensely shallow game, with only a few valid strategies. Half the fun, all the fun for me, of giving dedication to a game is discovering strategies that either the developers didn't intend, or know about, and in this type of game this is impossible.
This, I believe is the brick wall that most compy players (such as myself) are running into headlong.
I wrote this in linux programming class, so it may be a little underexplained or overboring, I will edit as necessary.
A trend that is generally noticeable to anyone who has tried to balance a game is that most balancing done by game studios falls into one of two styles:
The first is more expensive, and more chancy. You test the hell out of the game, and make sure that every possible move (if your testers are good enough) has a counter. Don't worry about "broken", just make sure that there is a counter. I say this is chancy because you are betting on two things: First, that your testers are good enough; second, that this balance still leaves distinction between characters/weapons.
The second route, and this is the one I believe Sakurai followed, is cheaper and far more shallow, and not nearly as chancy. In this approach, you basically envision your players' strategies and either decide to make them valid or invalid through your balancing choices. In this route, you know how the player will play because you can essentially make it the only viable way to play.
What the second approach does is create an intensely shallow game, with only a few valid strategies. Half the fun, all the fun for me, of giving dedication to a game is discovering strategies that either the developers didn't intend, or know about, and in this type of game this is impossible.
This, I believe is the brick wall that most compy players (such as myself) are running into headlong.
I wrote this in linux programming class, so it may be a little underexplained or overboring, I will edit as necessary.