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Smash Bros. Ultimate Custom Stages

Making good use of the Stage Builder

The most recent update for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has added in a Stage Builder that allows players to make and share their own custom stages. While this update has only just come out, I'm already planning out a few ideas to bring to life within it.

The first stage I'm working on is based on the Everfall from Dragon's Dogma (one of my favourite games of all-time). This is a dungeon accessed by leaping into a gaping hole in the ground, with different chambers attached to the sides which you can grab onto. If you reach the bottom of the pit you fall into a void that takes you into the air up above and you continue falling again. When I saw that the builder would have portals I thought this would be a fun setting for a Smash stage.

I made an incredibly rough prototype in the stage builder to get an idea for how a stage like this would play. Based on this I made a rough sketch of the chambers I wanted to include in the level, using this diagram as a guide to their layout (this was made at 1 in the morning so the illegible writing has been typed over). From there I built small models of these chambers out of toys to get an idea of how much playing space there was on them, and what they looked like from different angles so I can try to orient each chamber relative to the others just like they are in the game.

The next step will be making a scale drawing based on the stage builder grid and reproducing that in-game. I forsee the hardest part being making the non-playable parts of the stage look right. You can only craft 2D shapes across 4 planes that don't physically connect, so making things like concave curves in the background will be hard.