SRK: Skullgirls is launching with a small roster of just eight characters. While the lower budget of a PSN/XBLA release obviously means we won’t get a thirty-plus character roster, can you explain why you’re going with this number?
Mike Z: It was really just a function of time, money and our desired level of quality. We might have been able to make more characters if we cut down on their number of moves and animations, but that’s not what we wanted. We realize people are pretty used to huge rosters now, but with our limitations we aimed for depth over breadth. There are a ton of ways to build your team with the different team sizes and custom assists, so I think we have at least the gameplay variety of a larger game.
That depth extends beyond the systems to the characters themselves. All of our characters are really strong and good at what they do, and have a lot of little technical quirks to exploit. It’s kind of a joke around the office that whenever we reveal a new one, people automatically say they’re “broken” because they have so many useful moves, and I guess people aren’t used to that kind of gameplay density in a single character. Even Double, who morphs into other characters, plays totally differently – she got completely new animated-from-scratch specials, throws, and supers, and some normals were reanimated because she doesn’t have the original character’s power.
When you get to creating larger rosters it becomes hard to do without clones, but of course the mecha-satsui-no-hado-palette-swapped-dark-sunburned-elemental-ghost-shin-robo characters need to have distinguishing characteristics. And that’s when things start to get mushy, because why bother creating someone who is just someone else with a slightly faster projectile? Obviously we’re looking to expand the game in the future and it’ll be a challenge to maintain that level of uniqueness, but we have concepts and gameplay ideas for a lot of future characters and think we’re up to the challenge.
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