by Doc – Owner, Founder, Game Studio
You probably noticed that most of the amiibo training guides on this website are several years old, and that, while there are deviations from them in what the modern “optimal” amiibo would be, most of them are still about 90%, give or take, identical to what you’ll find in a typical high-level tournament today. In other words, amiibo innovation is a thing of the past, and we’ve figured it all out. This shouldn’t be surprising – the Belmont innovation was the last big thing (at least that I’ve known about in the metagame), and that was 2 years ago! There wasn’t a whole lot before then as of late either.
I’ve taken it upon myself to see if I can’t fix that. While we can’t develop a new Smash game, and we can’t reasonably apply our own mods, we can have the same concept as amiibo training applied to a different kind of game. Enter BadAssteroids.
That’s a… working title.
BadAssteroids is a Python game that I have been iterating on and refining for the last 9 months to a year, depending on how you stretch it. I’ve gone into more detail here (which you should watch), but the basic idea is that it’s like the old fashioned arcade shooters, but with movement options, several kinds of attacks, and “secondaries” that you can put on your ship to tweak their effects. Conveniently, you can also have the computer control a ship using a parameters based learning system that can observe your behaviors and modify its parameters accordingly. Sound familiar? That’s right, it’s the same idea as amiibo training, it’s just not in Super Smash Brothers. We’re taking this into our own hands.
I’m also taking the time to improve upon what was inconvenient or poorly planned about amiibo training – for example, I am including within the game the ability to create not just your own pilots (the trainable computer players), but also your own stage.. and your own ship and weapon as well. That’s right – if a ship archetype is too overpowered, the community can get together and either tone down its weapons, make it bigger or smaller, speed it up or slow it down, or otherwise tinker with its characteristics so that the community can basically create its own balance patch. The whole system is set up so that you can simply copy a 24 character code and send it to somebody, and they can recreate your pilot easily, or you can take the .txt file for your stage, ship, weapon or Pilot and give it to somebody to put in the folder, and it’ll immediately fully implement into the game. Between that, the very flexible and helpful in-game tournament hosting mode, and the built-in tier list maker, there’s a lot of fertile ground for a meta to develop here.
This game has undergone thousands of tweaks and refinements, and I’ve spent already several hundred hours of free time working on it. In the long run, I’d like to release it on Steam for a very affordable price, and otherwise let the community go nuts with it. Workshop integration, periodic DLC updates for everyone, and so on if there’s enough players and interest. You get the idea.
What do you think?
Amiibo Doctor 