If you’ve checked out our social channels, chances are you’ve seen what we’re up to in the stage departement. In this article I (Steven) am joined by fellow SSF2 artists Kirb-star and Turbo to cover the topic of stages.

We’ll cover some of the stages that have received significant improvements in this development phase, talking about the inspirations and train of thought behind the upgrades.

Hylian Skies

Hylian Skies takes place far above the world of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. This was one of the first stage updates we tackled, as we really wanted to create custom graphics for the background. Let’s take a look at the befores and afters:

Kirb-Star: “This stage was a huge challenge for us, but seeing Steven’s new background for it totally inspired me to work on a revamp for this stage, particularly bringing many elements of Link to the Past’s overworld to this stage, such as Kakariko’s Weathervane or the pillars seen in the Great Swamp.

While Link to the Past was a huge source of inspiration, many of the new visuals were actually made around A Link Between Worlds’ graphics, which actually gave us 3d renditions of many of the sprite-only elements from the SNES title. Great care was given to the Dark World variant now, as you will see the tree actually gets a face in this place, just like in the Dark World. Don’t worry, this one doesn’t spew bombs.”

Steven: “When working on stages, I try to design them starting with a unique key phrase in mind. The key phrase for this particular stage was ‘The Hyrule Fantasy’; meaning that I wanted to include many specific details of the overworld map of A Link to the Past that would remind players of their adventures in this version of Hyrule. I like the kind of stages where you could easily see ‘stories’ take place by creating interesting match-ups, so it was really fun to recreate the adventurous spirits of the game it’s based on.

Hylian Skies was one of the first stage upgrades we did in this development phase, and it inspired us to carry out more changes across the board. One things I really wanted to accomplish is making the Dark World background feel unique.”

Both the visuals for the Light World and Dark World have been touched up fully. In addition, 4 background cameos were added, including Ganon’s Bat Form and the witch Irene from A Link Between Worlds. Did you know Irene was inspired by an apprentice witch from the GBA remake of A Link to the Past? It’s fun to include tons of characters this way.

Twilight Town

Twilight Town is the starting world from KINGDOM HEARTS II. It’s pretty famous for its laid-back atmosphere, largely due to comfy glowing hue of the sky.

One of our biggest goals with this stage was to make the buildings more detailed and pulled closer to KINGDOM HEARTS II‘s visuals. You may notice that each building now resembles different buildings found in Twilight Town, such as the Accessory Shop.

You’ll also notice that this stage has received a few updates to its layout. When updating the stage, we also wanted to smooth out some of the bumps of the layout for a better flow throughout the stage.

Steven: “One of the elements I really wanted to include is the tram that rides through Twilight Town. With Twilight Town I tried to make the stage actually feel like a town people could live in, Most stages feel appropriately chaotic for a Smash match, but with Twilight Town we wanted to instead evoke the feeling my design key phrase; Lazy Afternoons. As a result, it has a different vibe than many other Smash stages, I think.”

The prominence of the tram track (although already a staple feature of Twilight Town in its origin game) in the background was ment to harken back to the entrance of Disney Land Florida, which likewise features a prominent station near its entrance.

Final Valley

Back when Final Valley was in development we had trouble deciding between daytime or stormy as its weather. For this update we’ve decided to include the stormy variant as an alternative appeareance for the stage. The stage itself has not changed much, but we have polished the colouring on the stage some.

Kirb-Star: “For the daytime version, we actually modeled its new colors to be as close as posible as how it looked like in the anime, with yellow to green rock formations. The new stormy variant has a very unique look, with very dark and gloomy lighting. Now you can recreate that feeling of watching Naruto AMVs set to sad music when playing on this stage!“

Down the line we want to look into making it rain constantly on the storm variant of the stage.

Yoshi’s Island

Turbo: “The creation of this stage stood as a challenge on its own, as the foreground is a floating section. The main stage is actually compiled of 3 different levels from the initial game, bringing in details from each respective area. The background was a ton of fun to recreate from the original game’s opening scene. I made sure to include all the core details of the island. In my head I wanted it to feel almost as if it were a whole explorable level. The retexturing was also a bit of a challenge, as I wanted to keep that original crayon-like feel but freshened up a bit.”

Clock Town

Clock Town is the central hub of Termina, where The Legend of Zelda; Majora’s Mask takes place. Within our team, Majora’s Mask is a universal favourite, so was really exciting for us that we were able to draw the stage a bit closer to its game of origin and include more background details.

Kirb-Star: “This was a very difficult stage to get right, as we had to keep the 3-day cycle of the background in mind. I loved all the hard work Turbo put into spriting this stage, and I wanted to try out a very great and detailed day-to-night transition that’ll surely stun anyone playing the game as I worked on polishing the coloring of the stage.”

Clock Town cycles through 3 days, each with different elements and events in the background. At the time of writing, these aren’t quite finalised yet, though. The images seen in the article therefore represent the stage as it currently exists in the developer build.

Yoshi’s Story

Kirb-Star: “This was a collaborative effort between Turbo and me, as I took care of the wallpaper on the back and Turbo took care of updating the playable area. It was fun giving fabric textures to every single detail.“

Temple

Turbo: “When going into this beast of a stage, It was treated as the Ultimate spriters challenge. Being one of the most iconic Smash stages of all time, I made sure to include every detail I possibly could. The result: possibly taking the longest time of any stage I’ve put my hands on. There are also details included that only appeared in the older Smash titles, which, if you think about it, is very in-line with how the entirety of SSF2 is designed.”

Bowser’s Castle

An iconic location of the Mario games and one of the more well known SSF2 original stages; Bowser’s humble abode features nearly same layout as before, but is visually redesigned from the ground up.

Turbo: “We talked a lot about which version of Bowser’s Castle we wanted to base the stage redesign on. Eventually, we decided Bowser’s Castle was a unique case where we could create sort of an amalgamation of different interpretations of the Castle to create a version unique to SSF2. One of the things I was most excited to include were the Bowser statues, inspired by Chaos Castle from Mario Party 10. Fun Fact: 3 versions of the Lava were finished before landing on our final product. We take our lava very seriously.”

And now, let’s take a closer look at something else we’ve shown a few times…

Palace of Twilight

Deep within the The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess‘ Twilight Realm lies this beautiful palace. Link and Midna fight to help the Twili race restore order to this realm and defeat the usurper king Zant. This stage is completely new to the upcoming update!

Steven: “Lots of news on stages from The Legend of Zelda, huh? Well, what can I say; I like the Zelda games a lot. As we had already included a lot of stages based on more classic Zelda titles, we wanted to include more recent (relatively speaking, haha) representation. The stage design was created by longtime team members l0z and Auraka, with pixelart and coding handled by me and Zero Insanity respectively. The stage’s platforms and pillars move and shift as you fight, so stay on your toes and adapt accordingly!“

This rounds out today’s blog on stage improvements. Many more improvements and changes are included in the upcoming update, but these were stages we felt really excited to talk about. We once again really want to thank everyone for the continued patience as we work towards releasing the next update.