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Bandai Namco shares more insight into Smash Bros. Ultimate's development (work load, challenges, stress-testing Switch, & more)

An insane amount of work to take on
by rawmeatcowboy
10 September 2019
GN Version 5.0

We've already covered some details from the Smash Bros. Ultimate panel at this year's CEDEC, but another round of information has come in. Check out a summary of Bandai Namco's insights into development below.

- with over 100 stages, Bandai Namco had the task of bringing back and creating new stages
- they had to balance the ‘game’ (functional) and ‘art’ (aesthetic) aspects
- Smash Ultimate’s Battlefield stage ran with the concept of ‘a grand place,’ and went through many designs
- the devs brought over Super Smash Bros. Wii U and tested how much they could do with it on Switch
- in the end, a majority of the Switch’s GPU is used on the stage, with fighters being second
- this is followed by the system, effects, items, and finally UI
- the team had to work on pushing down the GPU loads for each character
- for larger fighters like King K. Rool, even the insides of his cape are rendered
- the team reduced load by not rendering the parts that overlap with his body and aren’t seen
- Bandai Namco's basic strategy was to reuse as much of Smash Wii U's assets as possible
- problematic aspects were replaced entirely, and the team further optimized their development efficiency
- in order to reduce the game's file size, they removed duplicated data that was the same across fighters
- they also removed textures that were used in multiple parts of the stage
-Mario’s eyes and nose are consistent across the models
- the Super Mario Maker stage has reused textures

[link]