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VideoGamer.com: Looking back, what were the challenges from a production point of view?

DS: Well the art was the most painful one for the project as a whole. That is what took forever. There were also a lot of technical challenges that I wasn't directly involved with. Just getting the Dreamcast code to work properly was quite a big challenge and then all the online testing. I mean you've seen those problems with the online bugs right now. I don't know how to comment on that, but making an online game that can stand up to this kind of level of play and number of players, this is a very difficult thing to prepare for. So those guys over in tech had a lot of trouble.

Me personally, I mean I struggled almost every day with that whole project trying to get something done. Why do we have this hit box viewer that is not going to ship in the game? Why not have it ship? Nobody wanted it in there. Why not? The list goes on and on. Why is it that the most iconic colours of the characters' costumes, like Ken in the red gi, why can't you pick him in this new game? Because you couldn't for most of the project. So I had this list of these 20 things that I would harp on, like why are we doing such a bad job in all of these areas, and basically guilted a lot of people into doing a better job. The real critical hurdle though for me was having the rebalanced mode at all. At the very beginning of the project I asked Capcom about this and I assumed they would say, 'yeah right, no way'. The very first thing I said on it was, just take T-Hawk as an example, he jumps when you hold up after three frames and it's not really long enough to do the piledrive motion. So it's really frustrating to play that character. Why not put in a few more frames of jump so he could do that move? That was my first example. I had two or three, they were very small things like that, that I thought would improve the game.

There was actually some miscommunication even at the beginning where, their response was originally, 'yes that's great let's do that', and I said, 'OK great!'. Then they started to wonder, 'well wait a minute, did I mean that nobody would be able to play the original game?'. I said, 'well, you guys told me you wanted it to be perceived as a new game, so I thought you didn't want people to be able to play the original game'. And then they said, 'no no no no. We've thought about it more and we need to have both available if we're going to do it'. And so I told them, 'great I have no objection to that let's offer both'. That sounds like a good news story but the bad news story is that at Backbone it was a different perception. What I just told you there was at Capcom. Backbone, they just didn't want to do it at all because it sounded like too much work and who's going to pay for all this, it's hard enough to ship this game in the first place and were they going to assign programmers to help me? They didn't want to do that. So they said, 'no, we're not going to do it'. Just flat out no. I pretty much ignored that. I started reading the source code myself, and I'm not a programmer, and I'm certainly not an assembly programmer, so it's complete gibberish to me. Are you familiar with the Yoga Hyper book?

VideoGamer.com: Yeah, it's the Japanese Street Fighter bible.

DS: Yeah it's a Japanese book and it shows all the hit boxes and frame stats. So I had that book and I actually told the artists to get this book because it would help them know, like if they wanted to draw the foot a little bit bigger or something, if they saw the hit boxes they would know where it's OK to do that and where it's not. So that book was on our minds to begin with. I sat down with that book and I looked at the hit boxes and I tried to find really strange hit boxes and then I tried to find in the code, numbers that stood out that might correlate. I started to piece together what was what and then I finally found a Rosetta Stone. I found a weird hitbox in the book that matched up with weird hex numbers in the code, and that told me how their system works. I felt like I was doing science, coming up theories about how things work, testing them, and making new discoveries every day. I contacted Capcom, a guy who works at USA but he's really from Japan, asked for advice on how to decipher all of this stuff. He didn't really respond.

VideoGamer.com: Sounds like you were stuck between a rock and a hard place trying to make the game as good as it could have been.

DS: Yeah! Nobody around me really wants this thing to even happen and here I am researching code. Every once in a while I would ask some programmer that's sat next to me, 'hey can you look at this and tell me what this means?' and I would try to figure it out. Finally I was like, 'oh, I think I know how we can change these hit boxes'. The very first thing I did was change Cammy's Spinning Backfist to go through fireballs like it could in Super Street Fighter. That was a proof of concept. I did it! Oh I get it, I know how to do this now. Over the course of HD Remix there were so many different things that I would want to do though. Not just turn off the hit box, what about changing the size of the hit box? What about more recovery? What about changing the dizzy power? And so on and so on. There was research throughout the whole project of how do we do all of this? Like I said, a lot of it was me, I mean it wasn't all me, there was a real programmer that helped too, but it was somewhat under the table for a while.

I might have implemented half the balance changes myself, but Eric "Stiltman" Foley implemented the other half. And he also made probably most of the discoveries about how things work over the course of the project because he actually is an assembly programmer. It was hard to get his time though because he always had other tasks on his plate.

Eventually I had made enough changes to these files to make a new version that one of the programmers was like, 'you know you can't really be doing this'. And I said, 'well why not?'. And he's like, 'well we need to separate what you've done from the original code so it doesn't get mixed up'. And I said, 'yeah you can separate it, all you have to is use the version control software, you can roll back to the very beginning before I touched any of it'. He said, 'well you know, it would just be a better practice if we branched the code so we had the original here and we had your new stuff over here'. And I said, 'yeah that sounds great, why don't you hook that up in the menus, too!'. At that point it kind of became too much momentum to stop.

VideoGamer.com: It sounds like you nagged everyone to death.

DS: Yeah. So now it was starting to be in the menus and there's these two different versions and there's a new code tree now. I don't know, no-one came round and told me I had to stop so I didn't. I think it was a year before that project started I knew there was a really high chance of it happening. I didn't know this rebalancing stuff was going to happen but I knew it might happen and I didn't want to be in a position where I was like, 'all right, go as fast as you can change everything!'. I had no idea that this project was going to be so long. Most Backbone projects are super short. So I felt like I had to already know what I was doing before it even started. So a year before that project, the top Street Fighter players don't even really know this, but I was interviewing them for those balance changes all the time. I think many of them still never put it together. I would be at tournaments all around the country. We'd be watching a match and I would point out, 'hey Ken just won because of this, what do you think about that? Don't you think it's a little too good?', or 'he lost because of that, wouldn't it be so much better if he had this other thing that would help?' I would get their feedback, so for Ken I was saying this not just to whoever was standing next to me but to the top Ken players that I knew in the whole country, and so on and so on. I would float ideas by the top Chun-Li player and the top Ryu players. So I was preparing for a long time.

Be sure to check back next week for part two of our Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix post-mortem with lead designer David Sirlin.

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