Spark Game Design

Yesterday, Nintendo launched the Smash Bros. Brawl website. It’s not too exciting yet, but supposedly, it will be updated daily. The composer list released looks amazing. It includes Tomoko Sasaki, responsible for the music in Nights.

New Characters
As many of you may know, Snake from Metal Gear Solid fame, will be a playable character in this game. His inclusion opens up the doors to more possible characters that are not directly tied to Nintendo. With the teaming up of Sega and Nintendo for Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, many are speculating whether Sonic will be an included character. And if so, how will he play?

Different Gameplay for a Single Character?
After considering the inclusion of that blue hedgehog, I too, have wondered how the character will work. First of all, I would be curious to see a new life and death system for Sonic. Most characters die when knocked off the screen. I think it would be interesting if there were two ways for Sonic to die.The first way would be falling to his doom. Do not confuse this death fall with being smashed off the side of the screen or up top. Attacks on Sonic (including smash attacks) would not send him skyrocketing off the stage. He would fly just as far back no matter how much damage has been dealt to him.

So if it is difficult to knock Sonic off the screen, how would a player kill him? Unlike the other characters that accumulate percentage points while being hit, I think it would be interesting if Sonic used a “hit points” type of system. Except, instead of points, it would be a certain amount of rings. Let’s just say Sonic starts out with 200 rings (all of the ring amounts would probably need to be tweaked later on to balance gameplay). Imagine Sonic gets hit by an attack that would normally cause 5% damage. This attack would cause Sonic to lose five rings. These five rings are not gone forever, though. Just like in his Genesis days, getting hit would cause the rings to fly into the air. These flying rings can then be recaptured by Sonic. It would not be until he is hit with no rings that he would die.

This new system has two problems. Firstly, having one character follow a different life system than the others could cause numerous complications for the single player modes. Secondly, new players may find it confusing that for some reason, one character behaves differently than the others. Of course, another point to consider is whether or not this new gameplay would actually be any fun.