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Masahiro Sakurai, best known as the creator of Kirby and director of the Super Smash Bros. series, has launched a new YouTube channel about game design, offering tips and insights with the aim of helping to "make games around the world a little more fun." He clarifies that while the channel is intended to be accessible to everyone, he will not be streaming games or speaking off-the-cuff; these will be pointed video essays about "topics like game development and what makes games fun." Similarly, technical talk will be kept to a minimum, with the discussion centering more around game design theory.

Each video will be "bite-sized," ranging from two to five minutes, and will be uploaded in both Japanese and English. Sakurai notes that YouTube's duplicate content algorithm may delete one version of the other, but pledges to "keep an eye on it." On the topic of game footage, he plans to mostly use "the classics" to avoid potential copyright issues, and has also been granted permission to show off design documents and development builds from the Smash Bros. series. However, Nintendo is not involved in the development of the project, and Sakurai is paying out of pocket for video editors and translators. Despite this, he promises not to run ads or monetize the channel.

The series could be seen as a successor to Sakurai's "Think About Video Games" series, a weekly column that ran in Famitsu from 2002-2021.

The channel has just launched today, and already has three videos up. There's two introductory videos, one explaining Sakurai's goals with the channel and another giving an overview of his career. The third video is his first proper video essay, discussing the importance of hit stops: a brief pause in a game's action upon a significant moment, to help the player feel its impact and register what happened. Sakurai breaks down not only why hit stops are important, but their history, what types of developers tend to use them, and what genres could benefit from them.

You can check out "Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games" here.

 

[RedoLane]

I'm glad he's doing something different for the time being, but I hope that people won't get the wrong idea about game design and development, as these kind of formats tend to express a certain perspective and a simplification of the processes behind how games are being created.
In reality, it's not uncommon to be stuck in the conceptual stage, and way too common to have trouble with decision-making regarding major factors such as looking for a trusty publisher who accepts to work with you, handling a team(unless you're a one-person team) and splitting the work between them, all-things financing and probably more things that a fair amount of fresh newcomers tend to discover from trial and error.

Then again, SOME people will get the wrong idea anyway, jump into the drawing board and badabing, badaboom, mistakes will happen.

 

[Cris1997XX]

Finally taking a well-deserved rest from Super Smash Bros

 

[Marc_LFD]

The guy is 52 years old and yet he looks so young.

 

[Ampersound]

that's gonna be interesting, gonna check it out

 

[Cris1997XX]

The guy is 52 years old and yet he looks so young.

The power of Japanese people...

 

[Deleted member 194275]

Will he teach how to make a super annoying game and yet be praised by fans and the press? That was magical.

(For you who don't know, I'm referring to Kid Icarus on 3DS, a meh on rails shooter with a character talking ALL THE FUCKING TIME in a way that is even more annoying than navi form Ocarina of Time. When the said character goes away, another fucking annoying character takes her place in the same annoying way, to disable this "feature" you need to beat the game)

 

[bodefuceta]

The guy is 52 years old and yet he looks so young.

The power of make-up.

 

[City]

Yeah right. It's probably a new hint on his upcoming Smash character you guys.

 

[Guacaholey]

I'd rather he share his secret on eternal youth and reverse aging.

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Each video will be "bite-sized," ranging from two to five minutes, and will be uploaded in both Japanese and English. Sakurai notes that YouTube's duplicate content algorithm may delete one version of the other, but pledges to "keep an eye on it."

I'm a little amazed but not really surprised that YouTube has an algorithm for that but not at all surprised it does f*** all considering the same shorts and a ton of other few minute videos are everywhere. It's also ridiculous but not at all surprising that a platform as big as YouTube doesn't allow multiple audio tracks for videos.

 

[Guacaholey]

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Each video will be "bite-sized," ranging from two to five minutes, and will be uploaded in both Japanese and English. Sakurai notes that YouTube's duplicate content algorithm may delete one version of the other, but pledges to "keep an eye on it."

I'm a little amazed but not really surprised that YouTube has an algorithm for that but not at all surprised it does f*** all considering the same shorts and a ton of other few minute videos are everywhere. It's also ridiculous but not at all surprising that a platform as big as YouTube doesn't allow multiple audio tracks for videos.

 

[Spider_Man]

Game design tutorials from a guy that makes the same recycled titles over and over.

 

[tabzer]

Game design tutorials from a guy that makes the same recycled titles over and over.

Well, hopefully, the good parts, at first.

 

[Coto]

Iwata-san is a mentor i've followed since I was a kid. I can see the passion Masahiro Sakurai puts through game development. It's very important to develop games and/or port them, and build communities around it.
Hence, i'll also share (some of) the development work i've done lately: SnakeGL

Spoiler: NDS Port

Sincerely. Coto.

 

[City]

I'm a little amazed but not really surprised that YouTube has an algorithm for that but not at all surprised it does f*** all considering the same shorts and a ton of other few minute videos are everywhere. It's also ridiculous but not at all surprising that a platform as big as YouTube doesn't allow multiple audio tracks for videos.

YouTube has always been extremely biased towards the majority of the population speaking and hearing English correctly. This kind of bias was never called out by anyone because the most affected people are the ones consuming media in both English and their non-English native language, which is something that the vast majority of Google employees and content creators don't care about. They even axed the possibility of adding subtitles, as a giant "fuck you" to deaf people. You now need to ask permission from the video owner first, which might not be easily reachable.

 

[El_Doot]

YouTube has always been extremely biased towards the majority of the population speaking and hearing English correctly. This kind of bias was never called out by anyone because the most affected people are the ones consuming media in both English and their non-English native language, which is something that the vast majority of Google employees and content creators don't care about. They even axed the possibility of adding subtitles, as a giant "fuck you" to deaf people. You now need to ask permission from the video owner first, which might not be easily reachable.

also subtitles are just nice because I mishear so many things

 

[chaosagent]

Design is everything.