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In a panel session at this year's Game Developers Conference, Super Smash Bros. Brawl Designer Masahiro Sakurai discussed the development of the game's character roster, walking his audience through his selection process and the methodology behind how he designs various characters' moves.

After showing off Brawl's intro sequence and giving a brief historical overview of his two-man freelance design studio Sora, Ltd., Sakurai turned his discussion to the roster itself, noting that -- with the exception of Sega mascot Sonic -- the massive character lineup was finalized in July 2005. Sakurai explained that it was difficult, due to time constraints and consistency reasons, to make major character additions late in the development process. When selecting candidates for inclusion, Sakurai looked for characters whose individuality could be preserved while conforming to Brawl's gameplay, while also contributing to the overall game balance. And while he didn't name names, Sakurai admitted that some characters couldn't appear in the game due to "rights issues."

One of the major challenges during Brawl's development was to maintain a unified overall look -- which, of course, is easier said than done when you've got folks like Metroid heroine Samus Aran and Metal Gear's Solid Snake squaring off against cutesy Pokémon and cartoony Mario characters. Furthermore, Sakurai was under orders to base his character designs off of Nintendo's official models. His solution was to use more intermediate colors (as opposed to Super Smash Bros. Melee's bright, solid color palette) to bring subtle definition to the characters, while making slight tweaks to the designs. He used Mario and Pikmin's Capt. Olimar as examples, showing textured wrinkles and scuffs added to Mario's blue overalls, and additional elements to Olimar's spacesuit -- small but effective touches designed to make the characters mesh a bit better with the likes of Link and Pit.

Speaking of Pit, Sakurai singled out the angelic warrior -- absent from games since 1991's Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters -- as someone desperately in need of a revamp. The Brawl team modernized the pudgy, impish character from Kid Icarus from head to toe, dressing him in a sleek new outfit and notably arming him with a bow that could be broken into a two-bladed weapon ("sort of like Darth Maul in Star Wars"). "Making the character stand out," claimed Sakurai, "is job number one."

Sakurai went on to discuss attack animations, revealing that he used posable action figures as a means to easily (and effectively) convey his ideas to his team. Again, Sakurai stressed that a character's movements and abilities need to preserve said character's own individuality while conforming to Smash Bros.' rules; he presented a comparison slide illustrating Mario's and Samus' jumping animations from their respective games, noting Mario's quick falling speed and Samus' more "floaty" nature (due to the need for precision aiming during midjump), and explaining the emphasis he placed on understanding the logic behind these animations and faithfully importing them into Brawl. A brief gameplay demonstration followed, showing off some of the moves created for series newcomers Sonic, Snake, and Pit.

The panel concluded with a few words about the importance of Nintendo's official Smash Bros. Dojo website (www.smashbros.com) as a means to release news and information throughout Brawl's development -- obviously a solid strategy, as the site's hits peaked at 1 million per day and 5 million inside of a single week. That's a lot of Smash fans.

More and more, I want to use the stage builder.
This video made me realize you can recreate old stages with some skill. o=