Pegasus Knight
Smash Ace
- Joined
- Jun 1, 2007
- Messages
- 708
Disclaimer: I know it's too late in development for this idea to be implemented. Moreover, Sakurai probably doesn't even read Smashboards. This is posted as a mental exercise, just for fun.
So, one of the staples of Melee tournament play is that items are banned. Completely. This is understandable; random spawning adds variance to the game that isn't necessarily desirable. For example, an exploding crate falling all of an inch above your character for an instant KO - that sucks! Thus, it is a random gameplay element that simply isn't wanted in tournaments; fair enough.
But what if there a way to make them non-random, and give each character access to them? Hear me out on this...what if there was a percentage-based Item Meter/Item Gauge that built up as you did things the game designer wanted to encourage? For example, maybe he wants to encourage risky aerial combos, and the meter would increase its percentage when you did things like that? Please don't nitpick what exact actions it might be that would build this meter; the concept rather than the specifics is what's important here.
So now you have a meter filling its percentage (or it could be a graphical bar, like in Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, etc.). Fine. What could you do with it? Spawn items. The gauge would be depleted all at once, and could have spawning behavior where an item appears either in your character's hand, or very near-by so they can grab it quickly. The items could spawn randomly from a pool of choices; less powerful items would use less meter, better ones would use more. For example...
0-32 percent: Nothing spawns, no meter used.
33 to 65 percent: A single 'First Group' item will spawn. These would be items with a relatively low impact on the match, such as a 10% Healing item, a Pokeball that only spawns a random low-to-mid-power Pokemon, the Baseball Bat, Smoke Bombs, and so on.
66 to 99 Percent: A single 'Second Group' item spawns. These would be items with more impact on a match, such as a 25% healing item, a Pokeball with stronger Pokey-men within, the Franklin Badge, and so forth.
100 percent: A Smash Ball spawns. This would be the equivalent to blowing all your meter for a 'Level 3 Super' in games like Capcom vs. SNK 2.
Obviously the game's controls aren't conductive to spawning specific items, so the item created would be a random item from the relevant 'Item Group'. The meter would reset to 0 when used, so you only get one item at a time.
While the items spawned would be random, they'd all come from a pre-selected list of items aimed at competitive play. If this were to work precisely as I hope it would, you would have Legal Items in Tournaments because they are no longer 'scrubby random nonsense' that instantly changes the outcome of a match; they influence it, but you have control over when that influence happens. Fun idea?
So, one of the staples of Melee tournament play is that items are banned. Completely. This is understandable; random spawning adds variance to the game that isn't necessarily desirable. For example, an exploding crate falling all of an inch above your character for an instant KO - that sucks! Thus, it is a random gameplay element that simply isn't wanted in tournaments; fair enough.
But what if there a way to make them non-random, and give each character access to them? Hear me out on this...what if there was a percentage-based Item Meter/Item Gauge that built up as you did things the game designer wanted to encourage? For example, maybe he wants to encourage risky aerial combos, and the meter would increase its percentage when you did things like that? Please don't nitpick what exact actions it might be that would build this meter; the concept rather than the specifics is what's important here.
So now you have a meter filling its percentage (or it could be a graphical bar, like in Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, etc.). Fine. What could you do with it? Spawn items. The gauge would be depleted all at once, and could have spawning behavior where an item appears either in your character's hand, or very near-by so they can grab it quickly. The items could spawn randomly from a pool of choices; less powerful items would use less meter, better ones would use more. For example...
0-32 percent: Nothing spawns, no meter used.
33 to 65 percent: A single 'First Group' item will spawn. These would be items with a relatively low impact on the match, such as a 10% Healing item, a Pokeball that only spawns a random low-to-mid-power Pokemon, the Baseball Bat, Smoke Bombs, and so on.
66 to 99 Percent: A single 'Second Group' item spawns. These would be items with more impact on a match, such as a 25% healing item, a Pokeball with stronger Pokey-men within, the Franklin Badge, and so forth.
100 percent: A Smash Ball spawns. This would be the equivalent to blowing all your meter for a 'Level 3 Super' in games like Capcom vs. SNK 2.
Obviously the game's controls aren't conductive to spawning specific items, so the item created would be a random item from the relevant 'Item Group'. The meter would reset to 0 when used, so you only get one item at a time.
While the items spawned would be random, they'd all come from a pre-selected list of items aimed at competitive play. If this were to work precisely as I hope it would, you would have Legal Items in Tournaments because they are no longer 'scrubby random nonsense' that instantly changes the outcome of a match; they influence it, but you have control over when that influence happens. Fun idea?
