Interview: Project M

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is great fun, but it hasn’t flourished in the competitive scene in quite the same way as its GameCube predecessor. Despite tons of new content and modes, competitive Melee fans were left alienated by what they considered a slower, weaker sequel. Enter Project M, a fan-driven Brawl mod running on Melee architecture. We talked to team members Yeroc, Fly Amanita and Shadic about how Project M began, what they liked about Brawl and why players should be afraid of Bowser.

NoobFeed: I think most of us know what Project M is by now. Why don’t we instead start with how and where it began?

Yeroc: Well, the funny thing is, Project M kind of started before—there was a lot of work going on behind the scenes before it became, like, a popular mod. You could almost consider Project M kind of an extension of Brawl+, which was a more community-based project that was started by a lot of the same people. And then eventually those people kind of transitioned into working on Project M. when the steam behind Brawl+ kind of died out.

Way back in the summer of 2008, I personally remember seeing people coming to Brawl tournaments with modded Wiis with really simple codes, like… a really early version of the no-tripping code and early attempts at replicating the Melee air dodge framework. Basic things like that. Eventually the community kind of centralized itself and organized into more sophisticated coding projects. Things sort of came together from there, and it kind of coalesced into what everybody knows as the Brawl+ project.

Demo 2.1 went live in May, bringing bug fixes and the Skyloft stage.

 

There was a couple people who were kind of central to the whole thing, that took input from just about everybody. Shanus (Project M’s project leader) decided to go further toward a Melee-style environment with more Melee-specific applications. He built a Falco moveset file that was designed to emulate all of Falco’s moveset architecture from the Melee environment, as opposed to all the changes he got in Brawl.

We eventually adopted a more closed development style… and that’s when a lot of people that are working on the project now got involved in it. It’s been a really long progression… and Project M kind of followed. That was the beginnings of it.

 

NF: General perception is that you folks all hate Super Smash Bros. Brawl. But what did you like about it?

Shadic: The amount of content is especially mind-boggling. The roster’s pretty dang big. The amount of raw features and—everybody talks about the single-player, but there’s also all of the characters, the stages. It’s also incredibly good for modding, which is convenient. For multiple reasons, it’s made a great place to start this mod out. We have—what is it—39 characters. I’m not sure how the character count is if you split it.

Yeroc: Yeah, I’m gonna echo that. It’s the sheer amount of content and the diversity of all the content that was kind of what originally drew me back into the Smash scene. I’ve been a competitive Melee player almost since the game came out. I went to my first tournament in the middle of 2003 and I’ve been going to them off and on ever since. When Brawl was announced, I was really excited for the diversity of the characters, the expansion of the single-player stages, different game modes… to some (extent), the sticker collection, the Target Test—just everything. It was such an explosion of all the content that we were exposed to in Melee, almost on a completely new level. I was originally really excited with the prospects that I could see just by looking at all the updates that they had… Just by looking at all the updates they had before the game was released.

 

NF: Of course you also had some complaints. What weren’t you so fond of?

Yeroc: I feel like there was just something lost in translation for a lot of the more serious players. Brawl has a lot of content and a lot of things that I can understand would attract a lot of different types of gamers. But as a long-time competitive player, I felt like there were a lot of things that were done—and I hesitate to say that they were done deliberately, but it does seem that way—to the exclusion of competitive players.

Shadic: There’s a lot of, I guess the best way to put it is glass ceilings artificially put on gameplay, I guess. A lot of times it feels like you’re fighting against the game, and I think one of the greatest things about Melee is the fact that, the more you learn about it, the more you feel like you can do. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case with Brawl after a certain point.

Fly Amanita: I actually played Brawl competitively for couple of years and was reasonably good at it. The reason I stopped eventually was just that I found the game very dull and unrewarding. I do think that it does have its merits as a competitive game. It’s just that punishments tend to be really, really weak. It’s hard to get a lot of mileage off of single hits, with some exceptions here and there. The way the game works it tends to be, you do a tiny bit of damage over and over, and your opponent gets to 150 percent or something and then dies—maybe earlier. And it takes a really long time. It’s just not terribly exciting, for the most part.

Shadic: That’s a good point. It’s a much less dynamic game. A four-life game of Melee can be over in two and a half minutes. Less than that a lot of times. A Brawl match, as a sign of its slower gameplay, tournament matches are done with three stock instead of four, and I believe the average Brawl match is still longer than a Melee match.

 

NF: Is this an open-source project? Can anyone contribute, or is it a small team?

Shadic: It is a small team. Well, it’s a fairly decent-sized team now.

Yeroc: Decent and growing team.

Shadic: And growing. We have—depending on how you want to split it, because we have some people who mostly do playtesting, and then we have people who are actually coding characters, or coding stages, or doing other pieces of art. So, depending on where you want to split it, we have anywhere between probably 30 and 60 people.

But on the development team, the development process itself is closed off from the public. We take a huge amount of feedback from our players. Right now the big thing we’re doing for our demo 2.1 that is currently out is, we released it out into the wild and we’re spending a lot of our time behind the scenes, continuing progress in development. We’re spending a lot of time looking to see what the community is doing, how certain characters are developing. We’re trying to take a hands-off approach and just see what the world can do with the game that we’ve made so far.

Project M was recently featured at Melee tournament MELEE-FC10R in South Bend, Ind.

Yeroc: It serves a lot of different benefits for us. One, it gives us exposure we; we get to put on display the work that we’ve done so far. But we also get a lot of feedback from it. It’s almost a way to let the public help us playtest, because having hundreds of thousands of people play our game and come back to us with criticisms, or suggestions, or other observations. It’s a lot more productive over a period of time than just the 60 of us trying to come up with stuff, racking our brains to see how everything’s going to play out from a gameplay standpoint. We kind of use the public to help us figure things out and, in exchange, they get to playtest what’s almost a fully functional game and hopefully have a lot of fun doing it.

 

NF: Modifying a game so extensively has to be complicated work. How did you get the mod up and running?

Shadic: The Brawl modding scene has been years and years and years in progress. We’ve had a couple of large, figurehead, amazing coders pop in and out of the community. Probably the most famous code developer would be a man named Phantom Wings, who was the first who put out one of the biggest codes that we use. It’s a file patch code which allows us to dynamically, instead of loading all the files off the disc, it allows is to load game files from the SD card—which is one of the biggest things that we use in development.

We used a bunch of different applications. A program called BrawlBox is one of our most popular, and then we also use another thing called Project Smash Attacks, or PSA. PSA was also developed by Phantom Wings as part of his file replacement patch and coding.

Yeroc: The way that PSA works is, it’s kind of a moveset parser. It takes one of several files that constitutes any particular character. In this case, all of the attack data, the hitbox data and the functional framework for a character, behind the visuals… and all that stuff. Phantom Wings basically parsed everything out, figured out the structure of it and then wrote a program that reads and writes these files. We use that a lot, in lieu of writing a bunch of injections, which would be tedious at best and pretty mind-numbing at worst.

BrawlBox, we use for a lot of animations and model manipulation. The rest of it’s kind of handled by old-fashioned assembly, routine-writing. Hex code, PowerPC assembly injections that we write manually. We have some tools that help with it, but it’s still direct manipulation of the values that are in memory when the game’s running.

Shadic: It’s what you think of when somebody says hacking, almost. It’s that raw hex and assembly code. Actually, one of the very convenient things we found fairly early in development is that the Brawl character files and the Melee character files are structured extremely similarly. So, when we were looking at matching some move data to Melee for extremely iconic attacks or character physics, it was extremely easy to look at the Melee files once we figured out how to parse those and use the information from that—as compared to guesstimating, which we had done previously and hadn’t had the best results.

Yeroc: Cracking the Melee .dat files was definitely a huge, huge step forward for the project.

 

NF: And now you’re able to do almost anything you want with Brawl.

Shadic: Almost.

Yeroc: Yeah, more or less.

 

NF: So, tripping is gone?

Shadic: Tripping is long, long—Well, besides bananas, tripping is gone.

Yeroc: Yeah, we made a conscious design decision to only institute tripping on specific, isolated moves. Kind of as a function of that move, like, it’s a signature attribute to just a handful of moves, the most notable of which is Diddy’s bananas.

 

NF: What about Wavedashing? Tournament players really liked Wavedashing.

Shadic: That is a part of the Melee physics that we have adapted. Wavedashing has returned in its full Melee functionality. Which doesn’t mean you have to Wavedash to enjoy the game. It’s just an option for players who wish to take advantage of it, which is a lot of hardcore Melee players.

 

NF: What does it take to run Project M?

Shadic: Just a non-SDHC SD card.

Yeroc: Any secure digital card up to two gigabytes.

Shadic: And a copy of Brawl. And a Wii.

 

NF: Let’s talk about characters. I’ve always liked Bowser, but he’s traditionally been terrible. Will he be viable?

Yeroc: I would say he’s, uh, he’s probably a pretty legitimate threat right now. There are a few videos around on YouTube, of Project M tournament footage featuring me getting pretty handily destroyed by one of our other developers’ Bowsers—which is probably one of the best in the country. So, uh, Bowser’s kind of scary. Bowser’s pretty legit. He’s got a lot of tools that we’ve developed to help him keep up with the faster characters.

Shadic: He’s basically as Bowser should be. He’s big, he’s tough and he’s extremely scary to fight against.

 

NF: What kind of changes has he received?

Shadic: Probably one of his most notable changes is, first of all, he’s bigger. Second of all, he has Brawl’s system of armor on a lot of his attacks. There’s several different variations of the armor system based on either how much knockback or how much damage he’s received. A lot of times, if you try to knock Bowser back with a weaker attack, he’ll just sit through it and continue doing whatever he was. For example, Falco’s lasers will do nothing to Bowser if he’s crawling toward you.

Bowser can finally hold his own, thanks to some buffs to his armor.

 

Yeroc: I’d say, as a specific example, a lot of his smash attacks have this property. His forward smash used to be—at least in the tournament scene, a couple of notable Bowser players come and go and it’s always been fun to see how they can kind of manipulate their opponents into getting hit by a forward smash. In a lot of ways, it’s become a lot easier. Not to dumb the game down, but it adds another layer of things to be wary of when you’re playing against a Bowser, because his tools are a lot more usable now.

Shadic: I don’t remember if it was in Brawl, but there’s a very satisfying fire explosion if you hit with his forward smash, too. He feels a lot more rewarding to play. You don’t feel frustrated by the fact that you’re Bowser anymore. You actually feel like you’re playing a gigantic lizard-shell-dragon-turtle.

Yeroc: Satisfying is definitely the word that I would use to describe it.

 

NF: What about Link? He was great in Melee, but that didn’t carry over to Brawl.

Shadic: Yes, Link is kind of an interesting case. His Melee form had a few really good aspects on him, but there was a lot of things he struggled with. He was a character that could be pressured against extremely easy. He had a few super good moves; his neutral aerial was one of his most iconic moves, his Boomerang and Bomb game has always been relevant. In Project M, we removed his Gale Boomerang and now he has his standard Boomerang that he had in both Smash 64 and Melee. And it’s actually modeled a little bit more towards is Smash 64 Boomerang, which was a more potent, frightening version to have to fight against.

He’s kept some of the upgrades on his Brawl Bow, which means it charges up a little quicker—it actually charges quicker than it did in Brawl—and fires further, and hits harder. He has his old Spin Attack, his Up+B, from Melee, and it’s actually a little better to recover with than it was before as well, which also means that it kills like it did in Melee instead of the weak charge-up variation that he had in Brawl. He’s had overall just a few small, little tweaks that really made his character feel more comprehensive, and he feels a lot like he did in Melee, but overall better. So, there’s no huge, “this is it!” change for Link. It’s just he’s a more cohesive, stronger character.

 

NF: Who’s changed most significantly?

Fly Amanita: So, Lucario has this whole cancel system that was inspired by Street Fighter, I believe, where, if you hit an enemy or some other hurtbox—like a column on Brinstar, for example—you can cancel it into certain other moves. For example, you can cancel a jab into a tilt, you can cancel either of those into smashes, you can cancel any of the stuff into special moves. You can also cancel aerials into special moves and a few other minor things like that. But he has this whole cancel system that makes his pressure game pretty intimidating. It’s really substantially different than how Brawl Lucario plays.

Lucario's been infused with a bit of Street Fighter—complete with Shoryuken.

 

We also don’t have the same Aura system that Brawl did. Brawl had a system where his attacks got stronger as he took more damage, whereas now we have an Aura system that more closely resembles a super meter in a traditional fighting game. As that goes up, you get access to super versions of his special moves. For example, his Neutral B is Aura Sphere. If you have an Aura… you can do a version where you shoot a bigger and stronger Aura Sphere. It travels more slowly, but it does a lot more damage and it has a lot of legitimate applications.

 

NF: Are returning characters from Melee on the table?

Shadic: We’d like it.... When you said earlier that we can do anything we like with the game, it’s not quite true yet. We’ve not been able to seamlessly add characters into the game. That’s something that we’ve just barely discussed what our plans would be if we gained the capability to in the future, but it’s something we’d really like to do. Hopefully at some point we would have the ability to add new characters to the game, but for now it’s something that we’re not able to do. But I think a lot of people would like to see a Mewtwo who’s been powered up and given the Project M polish and buffs. It’s something we’re really looking forward to being able to do, but for now we don’t have the capabilities.

 

NF: To build on that, if you were able to add prior characters who weren’t in Brawl, that would open up the possibility of adding completely new characters.

Shadic: Theoretically.

 

NF: Any hopes for the next Smash title?

Shadic: I think the most interesting thing that’s come out of what little news we’ve heard of so far is Namco’s involvement. It’ll be truly interesting to see what some new developers do, even if Sakurai is still the prime designer of the game. I think it would be interesting to see what some new heads can inject into the Smash genre.

Yeroc: I think I would agree with that statement, just because Namco Bandai does have a… more prevalent slant towards its competitive audience, which we choose to look at as a potential positive for the competitive scene. It’s kind of hard to avoid using terms that insinuate a competitive-versus-casual dynamic, which is not something we want to do. But the thing is, a lot of us are of the opinion that the deeper and more competitive a game is, the more fun it is for everybody—across the entire skill spectrum. So, seeing a development team with a… background in developing really competitive games, we look at it as a positive, because they’ll make the game more fun for everybody, we think.

 

NF: Last question: Anything you can tell us about future plans for Project M?

Shadic: Besides the fact that we’re obviously planning on releasing, at bare minimum, all of the characters and hopefully all of the stages that were also in Brawl, I don’t think we have any amazing, unexpected news that isn’t still private.

Yeroc: Let’s do it this way: People who are familiar with the history of the project, with the way that our development has kind of progressed, should kind of know the deal by now. I would expect that everything that comes out in the future will follow that same trend. New characters, new coding advancements. We’re hoping it’ll be a steady progression of new content and additional features, more nuanced, seamless gameplay. And it’ll just be a solid progression from where it’s at right now to what we’ll consider to be the finished product.

Shadic: I don’t think we’ll necessarily have any huge Demo 2 updates where we double the size of the roster or anything.

Yeroc: We can’t double the size of the roster anymore.

Shadic: We’d have to start inventing new characters… So, hopefully we’ll be able to see releases a little more frequently than what Demo 2 was, because there was 14 to 15 months between the two (demo releases).

Yeroc: We’re discussing options for how we’re going to accelerate our release cycles. That’s a positive, but we’re still working on a lot of the details.

 

NF: Thanks a lot for your time, guys.

Aaron Kinney, NoobFeed

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