Audi famam illius - IMPORTANT GAME DISCUSSION

[mansionstaff]

Smash Academy has, for about seven years, been known as a school-setting game. The mods have discussed extensively options for the game's future and what directions it can go in to reflect its current state. We would like to introduce that to you and get your feedback. The pathway Smash Academy can take, is ultimately up to the playerbase, so be honest about what you want and what you think would hold your interest.

As Smash Academy ages, it is evident that it is losing focus on the things that defined it a 'school setting' to begin with. Class logs have become less frequently utilized, we're missing social cliques (jocks versus band geeks, for example), and other 'school' elements like the student council and overall feel of an educational institute. Sometimes there is difficulty incorporating certain "character types" easily into a school setting. Consequently, we're proposing moving said focus away from a school atmosphere and onto something new.

Introducing Smash Manor / Chateau / Mansion / etc.
We propose the concept of an excessively large mansion on the floating island. As you might recall, the Isle of the Ancients was introduced late summer 2014 and has been present since. By doing this, we can continue to hold many of the very popular events like dances, festivals, dormitory logs, blind dates, and kissing / memory mistletoe just as they have been. We would be eliminating events such as graduation and prom, but can easily substitute other appropriate celebrations in their place.



This does not mean we would outright eliminate the academy on the ground. We could leave that present and people looking to satisfy the occasional urge for school antics would be able to do so in either an entirely new and additional dressing room, or in the one we are currently using (which might be better in the long run).

Getting to FDC and its various shops, the contest hall, the bars, and so on, could potentially be relocated to a nearby floating island and become convenient for characters to reach, whereas traveling to the academy itself on the ground would be more difficult (in an effort to more effectively shift our focus off of a school setting).

Topics of Discussion

• Questions: what it says on the tin.
• State of the Mansion: how the mansion and living arrangements could be.
• A Whole New World: how the surrounding area and game environment could be.
• Event & Plot Lotteries: player submitted events (ala the game plotting thread in personals, only better organized).
• Challenge Mode: introducing new ways to spice up your rp, and get rewards and perks for it.
• Game Names: the name of the game is important!

Take some time to think about where you want to see Smash Academy go in the future years. Let us know how you want the game to evolve and change.

Comments

QUESTIONS?

[mansionstaff]

Just to reiterate: THIS IS MERELY A DISCUSSION POST.

Nothing is set in stone!

STATE OF THE MANSION

[mansionstaff]

Would you like to see a mansion that starts off a bit rustic, requires the characters to fix it up, and is not as nice as you'd probably expect (or like) it to be. In spite of fixing it up, some doors remain mysteriously locked and some passageways are not able to be explored. As game storyline progresses, characters would eventually gain access to some of these previously locked areas, discovering the secrets of the enigmatic Smash mansion.

Alternatively, characters could just have a new, shiny mansion to live in. Bring your stuffed animals and everything else you need or want. But there would still be locked doors, corridors, and other mysteries that could be solved and accessed over time.

The movement of the academy's network to the island is also something to talk about. In the academy, we have the technology needed for having a network community. Such a luxury might not be available right off to bat by moving to the island in the sky. What would you do if there's no network at all? Or we can just say the mansion has access to wifi and everyone still can use the network as they have been. (Maybe certain events and circumstances temporarily knock it out as applicable.) Or we can use magical devices constructed by Crazy Hand to keep in contact (meaning they could be partially unreliable).

How about housing arrangements? Shared rooms? Single rooms? "Team" floors? Themed floors? Shared chores? Robots or magic handwaving that takes care of housekeeping?

A WHOLE NEW WORLD

[mansionstaff]

Something else we propose is setting shifts on the island itself. Much like the seasons around the academy, we can shift and change the environment itself to whatever we want. We don't have to be limited by a conventional gregorian calendar either! The Island could have its own unique seasons and weather patterns (ie we might ask you guys to help make up a lot of fun such things).

The floating island could move physically to an entirely different location through slow levitation, warp bubbles, portals, etc. Maybe it could even float above Kanto or on another planet for a while. Events would equally be opt-in/opt-out, or may affect only a secluded part of the island. The sky is the limit (ha ha).

Would you prefer to have FDC tag along on a nearby island, or maybe play more with the concepts of "working together" to survive? Maybe outside supplies can only be ordered in via Escargo Express?

Something else to discuss is the very nature of the game itself. Currently, Smash Academy is defined as a nexus game with optional jam-jarring. Meaning, characters can freely leave Smash at any time and return to their home worlds, or be "stuck" here on the whim of their muns. While we enjoy that flexibility, sometimes it's difficult still to give certain characters motivation to stick around even if we do "force them". In addition, we currently we see a huge under-utilization of the mechanic of open world-hopping.

So what would be your "ideal" game? A full jamjar, where characters are mysteriously pulled to the island and can never leave? Where they are given the option to earn their exit through unlockables? Where they are given the option to earn their exit only after a certain amount of time passes or a personal quest has been fulfilled? Or would you prefer to still have Smash an open "nexus" styled game, where characters can freely come and go but have nothing realistically tethering them to the game (other than what you make of it)?

...Also thoughts on Loftwings...? Black Chocobos? Pokemon? Other wild colonies of flying mounts living on the island just waiting for some industrious characters to try and tame them?

EVENT & PLOT LOTTERIES

[mansionstaff]

This isn't anything quite new, so much as we're proposing a better way to organize the really great events and plot ideas we get on a regular basis. Right now they're submitted monthly in personals under the game threads but we're wondering if an entirely separate page might be a better way to structure them. Once the month has passed sometimes great ideas fall to the wayside.

What do you think about a separate page to submit events and each month we'll run an "event/plot lottery" to pick out what we think can run?

CHALLENGE MODE

[mansionstaff]

Something else we propose to keep game ideas fresh and fun is something akin to the Smash Brothers challenges only reformatted for RP purposes.

Players will anonymously submit challenges (example: thread out someone getting their arm stuck in a vending machine. thread out use of trophies gone wrong. thread out a smooch. match icons with someone five times in the same thread. three crack/not-serious tags. meet double-triple-quadruple the activity check requirements. post a meme in the ooc community. have your character make a gross misunderstanding about another character. subject them to a whacky transformation. goad captain falcon into punching you and live. discover a new floating island. get into a fight over what to name the new island. start a log with the letter "X" in the title, survive a great Excite Bike Migration, etc.) and once a month during personals/CR meme we'll compile and post a list of a group/block of challenges. Players will submit threads that meet the challenges and be rewarded with IC powers, or access to locked doors in the mansion, the ability to world-hop, travel back home, see a castmate, or something. WHO KNOWS. WHATEVER YOU COOL PERKS GUYS LIKE TO BE REWARDED WITH.

We could group unlockables & rewards like this:

• PERSONAL (CHARACTER) UNLOCKABLES: special powers, smash balls, etc whatever.
• PERSONAL (PLAYER) UNLOACKABLES: free AC strike, etc.
• LOCAL UNLOCKABLES: rooms in the mansion, new local locales on the island or nearby islands.
• REGIONAL UNLOCKABLES: warp pipes to home worlds, etc.

We may reasonably put lock-limits on either per player, per character, or per month to keep things fair/to manage pacing better, depending on how all this works out.

Once that group/block of challenges has been met, we'll make a new one and the process can start anew.

What do you think?

GAME NAMES

[mansionstaff]

Let's talk about game names! Here's a list we came up with:

smash land
smasha firma
smash manor
smash isle
smash rising
smash without borders
smash gaiden

This is definitely not the end-all-be-all of name ideas though, and this thread is open for any suggestions.

Re: STATE OF THE MANSION

[rivalkidneypunch]

I do think some form of shared housing is kind of nice, as it can make a really good starting point for new characters to build CR.

I also do think some kind of event setup to introduce the change would be a good idea, whether it be fixing up the mansion/establishing communication/etc. or not. It's not gonna be a seamless change either way, so rolling it in with a bit of a bang might work better? So I would not be opposed to the mansion being a spoopy mysterious fixer-upper kind of thing, per se. It makes a nice chance for a sort of event-like ongoing thing for characters who aren't necessarily super action-oriented.

[rivalthunderbolts]

My personal opinion on the matter is thus:

I still like the nexus element of the game, but the question is how people end up on the island mansion in the first place. So I don't see this premise working as anything other than a full jamjar, say where Master Hand is animating trophies/bringing people here to fight for his own cross canon amusement, and keeping them there until he gets bored and sends htem back. Get rid of FDC altogether, and have the island traveling dimensions/worlds, stopping by for antics/cross canon funtimes. And to link back to the premise, Master Hand could organize battles between the residents.

[rivalthunderbolts]

I honestly don't know how I feel about this. I think on the one hand it's an interesting way to get people prompts who otherwise have no idea what to do at a given time.

On the other hand, I'm not thrilled about the reward ideas. It feels to me like it will just end up with private plots going on all the time, with players getting access to parts of the mansion that others don't have. Not to mention new characters who show up and already are compartmentalized into groups who don't have any of the IC perks that veteran characters get by virtue of being around longer. For current players that's sort of a given, but for new players, I fear it might end up a barrier to entry.

And having locked parts of the mansion that contain mysteries implies Smash is going in a direction where there's going to be a set story with an endgame and eventual hard ending, rather than the open ended slice of life kind of thing.

Also when it comes to things like free AC strikes, I feel like the people who would end up winning those are the people who would need them the least.

[rivalthunderbolts]

I'm telling you. ROB caretakers.

I'm hesitant about the idea of the locked areas of the mansion, for the sole reason that means this game now has a shelf life, instead of the open ended open world setting that I've come to love. I don't want Smash to have a hard ending planned out.

I'd say leave the network as is and just move the servers to the mansion. That technology already exists on the island already, and the old underground lab could be part of the mansion as like. The X-Men mansion basement kind of thing.

A NEW FANTASTIC POINT OF VIEW

[rivalkidneypunch]

I like Jeff's idea for a jamjar explanation, but I'd also like to chime in that I prefer the not-fully-jamjar setup to the forced-imprisonment kind of thing.

I understand that some characters struggle with the "why would they willingly stay here" motivation bit, but with a jamjar setting, I think some character types would struggle as well, since realistically some folks wouldn't be all that okay with being forcibly stuck on an island, but there wouldn't be any kind of progress they could make on what would be a huge part of their motivation -- escaping and going home. Plus, I think completely cutting out the world-hopping nexus stuff would be more of a limiting factor than a helping one.

Maybe a system that's only mostly-jamjar or something? I admit I like the monkey's-paw style idea mentioned above where players earn the right to leave (or think they've earned the right to leave but monkey's paw), so there's lots of room for players to say their "I don't wanna be here" character has had terrible luck with actually getting home while other characters can use the world-visiting for plots, etc.?

[icequeen_aran]

Nah, we definitely don't have an "end game" in mind, no hard endings here. We unlock some doors, maybe some others close. Maybe there's doors behind doors. Benny-Hill themed hallways, all that fun stuff. We can do a lot. We really love the idea of an open world to explore too, and would use a change like this in setting to encourage that even more.

[rivalthunderbolts]

WHAT IF.

What if they're not completely jamjarred here at all. What if the existing characters are relocated here, and new characters find their way to the island through mysterious warp pipes/warp rings/sling stars/some other vidya gaem mode of interdimensional transportation. Add a place in the mansion, like say a big hall of warp pipes or something. They can all take you home. Only problem is... none of them are labelled.

So that could be a player event. Trying to figure out where all the pipes go, and ending up in every other video game world along the way.

Em here just lurking

[damnjuanhessohotrightnow]

oh my god has the excite bike migration become a Thing now

[icequeen_aran]

Thanks for these concerns! It's hard to say how things would ultimately play out, but we would do our best to try and not encourage powergaming and the like, and have rewards benefit individual characters and also benefit the game as a whole.

Maybe a door that acts as an insta-portal to Kanto gets closed for a week, and a challenge must be met to reopen it. Maybe only one character will be able to do it but everyone in the game will praise that character for being the one to open the door--or something like that.

We would like to do special things too, as a driving incentive for the rewards. Definitely not looking to set levels of command. We are not a cosmic demolition crew here except samus.

We definitely talked about free AC strikes while we were crafting this post and we, as mods, all agreed the only way we would give those out as rewards were to people who met challenges like "meet triple the activity requirements". IE people who are EXTRA ACTIVE may only earn AC strikes, and we would also limit those to one per use, like no saving them up and using them month after month or something. That's not fair to anyone.

bbbbbbbbb

[icequeen_aran]

Yes.

This is all your fault.

It's A Thing now.

[icequeen_aran]

I'm kind of partial to "smash rising" and "smash manor".

[boostpower]

smash rising revengeance

[icequeen_aran]

YEAH WE'D. HAVE TO GO GRAB GROOVE AND TALK DETAILS but we threw around ideas like a Majora's Mask styled catalyst to bring it in. Space time warping and all coming into play too, so we could easily justify things for whatever direction we ultimately go in (jam jar vs nexus vs something in-between, ect.)

It'd have to be big and exciting and fun whatever it is, I think.

return of gigyas: the revenge of player prayers

[thunderwang]

the mansion is actually nanomachines

still Em

[thefaceofjustice]

they just want to flock to their nesting grounds okay

[rivalkidneypunch]

I'm not, like... hard-opposed to a reward system, but I am kinda hesitant? I am worried that it might create a sort of gap between players -- like new players might end up missing out on a lot of plot/CR because it centers around exploring an island that only a small group of veterans have unlocked access to, etc. Especially in the case of challenges that are... limited? Like, to use the above as examples, only the number of people Whit can handle threading with are gonna get punched by Falcon, and I'd assume only so many islands can get discovered in a month.

I'm just tossing out blind wild ideas, so take them with a grain of salt, buuuut maybe I'm gonna pitch some other ideas?

- Make local unlockables game-wide, not character-specific, possibly with bigger groupwide requirements? (Like... x characters have to meet AC, x logs must be played to completion, etc)
- Make big rewards things you have to apply for, like extra character slots? Like, "okay you can have some smash balls if you link us [a major character development you partook in/CR with x different characters/4x the AC requirement]" so there's less dependency on doing plot-important or time-sensitive stuff and new players don't have to wait a month etc. to get one thing to sort of catch up to the veterans?
- Roulette-style things where people don't necessarily know in advance what they have to do to get a huge unlockable? Like when AC goes up include a "if this month your character did x, link it and win a free ipod get a smash ball" or whatever?

[rivalkidneypunch]

five nights at crazy hand's
smash yellow version: special pikachu edition
indigo prophecy
smash 2: the smashening

A DAZZLING PLACE I NEVER KNEEEEW

[raw_angel_power]

I was really appreciating some of the backstory elements that were being dug up about Smash's past recently, so maybe we could keep those while reworking them into the new school-deemphasized setting? I'm mostly curious about what the big point is in bringing smashers to this world. Why does Master Hand invite them here?* Is it just to watch them duke it out, or is there a greater underlying purpose that isn't immediately obvious? When it was a school, the reason Smash Academy came into existence was to train smashers to become ultimate fighters because of some war that took place- I think it was Subspace Emissary. Correct me if I'm wrong or not remembering right for any of this.

I think all of that should still be incorporated as far as mysteries go, though with less of a 'this is a school for getting stronger.' Instead, we need to take out the school from that sentence. 'This is a _____ for becoming a better smasher.' Probably not, 'This is a mansion for becoming a better smasher'. It has to be something else. The mansion seems to be mainly a living arrangement, or a key aspect of the setting.

My main concern is, 'so how does smashing fit into all of this? After all, this is a Smash Brothers-based game!'

It might be cool to have tournaments for our characters to work towards. Really big and sensationalized tournaments where everyone in FDC can see it being broadcasted. These would be a staple of the game. I don't know how often these can happen, but it should be done at a frequency everyone is comfortable with. My thought is starting it out bi-annually and adjusting depending on how well it works out. Of course, it's a completely optional event, but still a really big deal. And not just tournaments, but other broadcasted contests. Or... non-broadcasted contests. If motivation for characters to stay is an issue, then maybe the reward for becoming a tournament champion is SUPER HUGE. Oh look, you won your own private island. Not into that? What about a cash prize that's ENOUGH to buy you your own private island? Or maybe you can go all genie on this and they get a wish granted. Any wish. See back for details.

That said, it makes me wonder how FDC fits into this, and how the smashers' relationship to the city as a whole is. I personally perceive it being that smashers are almost like celebrities, or by being a smasher it denotes a measure of prestige among the commonfolk. Kind of like... major sports players who also happened to save their world? Not like, royalty or anything, but depending on how successful the character is or whether they're like, MARIO or someone big-name like that it makes them seem REALLY COOL to your regular old goomba joe. I'm curious about other people's thoughts regarding their status in the city.

I ALSO PERSONALLY THINK FDC SHOULD BE WITHIN EASY ACCESS OF THE MANSION BUT THAT'S MAINLY SO THEY HAVE MORE TO DO WITHOUT NEEDING TO WARP OR MIGRATE OR WHAT HAVE YOU. FDC should still be an important element in the game.

I also thought about a kind of 'tier' system like you see in the tournament community. It seems a bit risky to implement, though, because while it would be really interesting to see IC drama arise when characters are placed into a rank and given different privileges and status (better rooms than lesser tiers, more concessions, more fans, etc.) because of it, there's a high chance that if not done carefully, it can give rise to... OOC drama. Which is not what anyone wants. Still, I think it's worth considering. IF anyone is into this, it can be based off something like individual performance in Smash events. Thoughts? This is a very underdeveloped idea, but it has potential to make things interesting.

*Also, maybe we should address how people arrive to Smash. Do they have to be invited by letter? Magically poofed? Maybe it's seen as an honor?

MORE FOOD FOR THOUGHT: I'm very interested in having focus be given to character movesets, their final smashes, etc. Or customizing their stats, kind of like what was implemented in SSB4. Kind of like ye olde Smash Fundamentals, before I was even around. Maybe a character doesn't think their current setup is working out, so they rework it from the ground up and try new strategies to win in the next tournament? Personally, I think building these sorts of things would be fun, especially for those who don't have a preexisting moveset and want to consider how their character might work if they were in the new Smash Brothers game. Of course, this can also be a completely optional thing that you only have to do if you care about it enough. Forcing it on people is just lame.

I hope I'm making sense. I have a headache that is making me completely delirious. I feel like I still have more to say but can't formulate them into connecting paragraphs. If it doesn't, please harass me until the cows come home.

[awakeningwill]

Cuz mods said it was okay for people to make their own top levels for general thoughts and such, here goes?

Forewarning that I have never played at any other game, so I really have no frame of reference for how anything works anywhere else. That said, reading all the ideas did have me really excited. The premise sounds really cool, and the community does need to get rejuvenated.

I still feel really hesitant though, mostly because keeping memories + removing the school setting complicates the motivations of a lot of characters for being around. And I don't really have an interest in playing a jamjar. Not to mention I'd have to completely retool a lot of planned character development if I wanted to keep the same dudes, if I could even justify it at all. In the end, it feels like if I played at this new setting, it'd have to be with a completely fresh slate - at which point, it might as well be a pure reboot for me. Like, the change is potentially good for players who have characters that struggle with a reason to stay, but it feels like it messes up a lot of the characters who just want to be at a school.

Like, I'd personally feel more comfortable if there was a school setting option attached to the game officially, partially for smoothing over the transition and also just because... I dunno, having the school be purely dressing room flavour feels like it takes away the legitimacy of what happens in terms of continuity? It could just be a permanent portal to the school and whatever happens there is more or less treated like an offworld log or something. I know that moving away from the school as a setting is important to transition the overall game, but it makes me really anxious after investing so much in it. Plus, I've always liked jobs being imposed on certain characters. I guess cuz it gives them a general thing for them to do that's not purely self-driven adventure mode.

I guess overall I just feel really nervous. It feels like I'm going to need to pick out a whole new roster - I don't have that many muses to begin with, and I survive very poorly in PSL if I need to drop existing characters that I'm still invested in. Anyway, I guess those are my personal thoughts. I'll keep trying to digest all this.