Super Smash Bros. series director Masahiro Sakurai is known for sharing information about behind-the-scenes development and other little tidbits about how his games are made.
And over the last 10 days, Sakurai has been showing off some of his picture-taking prowess using the game’s camera feature. Some of these images are only possible due to some of the developer tools being used to manipulate the camera, which makes them even cooler.
In his first post featuring one of those images, Sakurai explains that he would frequently include similar pictures in the daily reports sent out to the development team while they were making the game.
“During the development of Super Smash Bros, I kept raising the images under development once a day in the daily reports released to the team,” Sakurai said. “It continues all the time. I’d like to upload these images at random once a day for a while. You may use the debugging function for shooting, but please pardon!”
The first image, of course, features Sakurai’s first character Kirby in a very cool shot featuring both Kirby and Hero from Dragon Quest looking off into the distance of the Battlefield stage. Without the developer tools, this image would be nearly impossible to capture.
Other examples include Kirby’s copy version of Kazooie interacting with the original Banjo and Kazooie characters, Wolf holding a flower, and a clash between Zero Suit Samus and Bayonetta. Most of these are done with the regular camera, but they are still very well-shot with a lot of attention to minor details.
One of the more impressive photos is another one that uses the developer tools, which shows a downward shot of Ken at the apex of a Shinryuken. This image probably took several attempts to capture even with those extra assets, but as Ken says in the game, “sometimes it’s more important to have a stylish victory than a quick one.”
This is a great way to show off how cool the side features of Ultimate can be if you spend time experimenting with them. The camera controls have only gotten more complex and useful since Smash 64 first came out and the community keeps pulling off crazy shots with them too.
As Sakurai said, he has been posting these images every few days at completely random times, and with how long the game was in development, it is likely he will continue to do so for quite a bit longer. You can view all of Sakurai’s posts on his Twitter or through the collected album that a few community members are keeping of each image he posts.