Lawl Nova Retrospective

Hi, I'm Skapokon and man, 4 years making Lawl Nova! This is amazing and I didn't expect myself continuing for so long. I've already made a lot of Retropokon Anniversary Specials, but not a single Lawl Nova one, so I think it's time to get deep on the history behind my Lawl Spin Off. A series of videos that went from mediocre (Even if people found it OK, but that's for later) to one of the most popular ones, or at least that's what you say. So, let's start with the small history before I made Doofenshmirtz's moveset.

Early Attempts

The roots from Lawl Nova come from the time I posted text movesets in Aitor Molina's Lawl Sprites, both in Facebook and his Blog. At first, I didn't really liked those sprites because he excluded many important characters, yet greenlighted pretty bad suggestions like Wart or Dimentio (Who didn't make it, luckly). However, I ended liking and supporting his project suggesting characters and ideas. The movesets I posted were Weegee, Dark Helmet, Ophelia Chill, Sheldon Cooper and Dr. Doofenshmirtz. I also wrote other movesets, but I never had the chance to show them, like Moar Krabs (What was thinking?) or Yzma.

Later on, Aitor suggested me to start my own Lawl. I wasn't sure about it, because most of the Spin Offs during that age recieved really negative feedback. However, I thought that Lawl deserved more respect. People who wrote in Facebook movesets made incredible and creative movesets. To name a few, we had a moveset of Raoul Silva by Aitor, which was later made as a video moveset, and I remember some pretty good ones for Dr. Rabbit and Stu Pickles. However, people who actually made the movesets in videos... Uh... Apart from the original, YTPGuy and ARL were the only good ones. So, I decided to make movesets. I created a Roster, and went aboard.

In one of my earliest rosters, I was going to have a total of 3 rosters. One decided by me, one decided by Aitor and one decided by the audience with the Empty Slot. However, this changed when Aitor planned to make movesets as well. The only character from Aitor's Roster that Stayed were Red & Leo, because I liked the idea of an alternative Snake. Since Aitor decided to add me as his Snake, I used one (well, two until I demoted Leo to an assist character) from his original characters. But I digress. While in my Roster the first character was Chowder, I decided to start with the character which had the first moveset I published in Facebook...

Dr. Doofenshmirtz's Moveset

During that time, I wasn't sure which program I was going to use, so I decided to use Scratch.

Damn was it tedious. I didn't enjoy the program because it wasn't really suited for animations, as it were made for videogames. Instead, I chose Pivot Stickfigure Animator. A program to make Stickmen animations, which allowed the use of Sprites. I wouldn't be so stupid to make a Lawl with Stick Figures, right? (Well, the creator of Zawl was). To make the moveset I had Pivot to make them, Hypercam to record them and VideoPad for the editing.

The hardest part about making this moveset was finding the Inspiration Clips to crop the images. I only had YT to work with, because that was the only page I knew about! As you may remember, the Up B's Inspiration Clip was in Spanish, and the Final Smash didn't have one at all! But that's just the beginning. No idea why, but VideoPad started working horribly. It rendered the video, and it was usually Empty, or cut after the Roster was shown. So I had to record the video with Hypercam in the preview mode, download a new version of Videopad and put it there. However, it wasn't that good. I had to record the sound separated, because Hypercam didn't allow it.

The problem was that the recorded video had horrendous colors, and other clips not recorded from Hypercam were frozen. The moveset became an ugly, earraping mess that I wanted to cancel, but I uploaded it anyways. I expected everyone to hate it. However, it turned to be much better than I expected. People seemed to say that even if the quality of the video was bad, they said the quality of the moveset was good. That was good enough to continue making movesets.

“The Skapokon's Lawl Era” 

I think that with 4 years making this Lawl it's about time I divide the whole thing in eras, much like Chincherrinas does. “The Skapokon's Lawl Era” is the first one. I call it that way because at first Lawl Nova didn't have a name, and was called just Lawl, so people refered as it as “Skapokon's Lawl”. Well, they would have done that, if it wasn't because of nobody spelling my name right, which was one of the reasons that I decided to give it a proper name by the time I made Yzma's moveset. However, this era does not finish with Yzma, but rather with Captain N. But why?

I still call this the Skapokon's Lawl era because at the time I was still developing Lawl Nova's own quirks and tropes. All characters from this era were picked because they were suggestions in other Lawls, mostly by me. Even the Empty Slot was full of characters from YTPGuy's Empty Slot! And since at that time I was just another Lawl, I really didn't have much standards. Dr. Doofenshmirtz's moveset is the obvious example of this, but Yzma and Sheldon didn't really do much better. And then there's CD-i Zelda, with the unreadable texts and awful sound quality. Most of these issues were part of Videopad and Bandicam problems, but did I do something to fix them? No, I just left them as they were.

With Captain N some of the problems present in the previous movesets were fixed. For example, I used to add the texts with Pivot, but now I do it with Videopad because they look much better. But the sound quality and unscripted movesets were still there. Looking back, most of the issues with these movesets were mostly technical, and the actual movesets still hold up today. Which was sort of the opposite with the next era:

“The Approval Era”

Something huge happened when I made Captain N's moveset: Chincherrinas himself liked it. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, the Original Lawler himself liking what I did? This was so awesome, and a great step forward in the right direction. I had to make ALL my movesets as good as Captain N. And that... sort of... backfired.

Knowing that Chincherrinas liked my movesets, I had to top my standards. That not only meant having to correct technical issues from previous movesets and how I now work with scripts, but that also meant that the movesets had to be more creative, unique, complex and weird! Each one of the characters had moves that lead to different attacks (Worst Hercules' Sword), move with random effects (John's Bizarro Rescue), some kind of gimmick (Elsa's Ice Magic) or moves with effects were never seen before (Timmy's Dad's “Add-a-Dad”).

From this era I have to praise myself for the creativity. Not a single move had to be straight-forward, and the more possible things you can do with this attacks, the merrier! Dipper Pines is a positive example from this era, as his entire moveset had attacks with effects rarely seen in movesets, making him a breath of fresh air.

The problem is that I was so obsessed with trying to make the movesets as unique as possible that I forgot an important part: Being actually good fighters. And that's the main problem with the movesets from this era, which funnily starts and ends with a Joke Moveset, that the characters are too complex and unique. I later learnt that Random Effects are actually not very liked by the Smash Community, and I wanted to add as many as possible here. Toon Guybrush is sadly the worst offender. Don't get me wrong, I still like his moveset for its quirkiness and how I introduced my audience to the I Wonder What Happens videos, but his Specials are not really that useful in battle, which is why I'm going to give him good stats and normals to counter this.

Lawl Nova during The Approval Era was far from being a bad Lawl, or worse than The Skapokon's Lawl Era, but the movesets that were made during it were kind of overwhealming and I didn't even notice that it was bad because for me, having a lot of options always equaled a great moveset! That was about to change in our current era...

“The Competitive Era”

About the time I started with the stages and other extras, I became interested in competitive Smash Bros. The inclusion of “For Glory” in Smash 4 as well as AlphaRad's How to Play Smash 101 made me interested in something that I had ignored for years for being “too difficult” and “not fun”. Although I'm far from being ZeRo or Mew2King, I discovered the rules of competitive play as well as the reasons why a character is considered Top or Low Tier. I applied the Stage Rules in my Stages video by making some stages less chaotic (such as removing the Walk Offs from John's House and redesigning Elsa's Ice Castle) but it wasn't until the Classic Mode video when I applied this to the movesets themselves.

Classic Mode is the Lawl-Related video that took me the most time to make, and the main reason is that I had to make the battles believable. To do that, I pretty much made the video with my 3DS always on hand, using Smash for 3DS as a referencial guide for damage and knockback. When making Classic Mode, I realised that some characters had subpar competitive value with some attacks, which is why my focus was shifted in the movesets I made after it. I didn't only want to make creative movesets that were faithful to the source material, but I also wanted to make the characters good, so that anyone watching my videos would be like “I'd main that character”. This goes without saying, but Joke Movesets are obviously the exception.

Asdfguy already showed a bit of this with his Down B being changed from a random roulette to a cyclical attack, but the character that shows the Competitive Era the most is Perry the Platypus. Perry is a “Tier-Whore” character at its finest, the combo-heavy agile character that wins tournaments and makes casuals cry for nerfs. Best Waluigi is also an example of this shift, with a more traditional moveset despite being a very weird character.

AlphaRad wasn't the only Smash Youtuber that helped me improve my Lawl, though. RelaxAlax is also someone I should thank. With his “Know Your Moves” videos, I discovered that many characters in Smash Bros not only brought moves from their games, but also had an overall gameplay style based on their games. This was something that was perfect for Lawl, and I have been using it since then. Asdfguy's moveset is random because his shorts are random. Toon DK's moveset is directly influenced by the Crystal Coconut because that was the formula of the show. A good Star Butterfly player must know to think twice before acting and correct their mistakes because that's the lesson that Star herself is trying to learn. And the list goes on.

Do I still like to put on some complex gimmicks and multi-use attacks? Yes, but I also try to implement them in a way that the complexity pays off, or that all effects are useful and accessible. If these characters were made during the “Approval Era”, they would have been worse in this regard. Star's Magic Wand would have been random, asdfguy's Pointless Button would have been random, Waluijafar would have been random and I still remember how I wanted to implement Jade's Sylladex and it was so cryptic that I don't even want to describe it. This system was still a thing during John's moveset as you can see that Jade has three cards stored but no cards in hand. I'll leave you to make your own theories about how was it going to be implemented originally.

So we are currently in the Competitive Era, in which my target is to make movesets that can be enjoyed by anyone: Competitive players and casual players, those who just like the source materials or have no idea what they are about, veteran Lawlers and those who are introduced to the matter because of this... I don't think anything that causes a new era will happen anytime soon, but only time can tell. Until then, I hope you liked this video and thank you everyone for being such great subscribers and fans. I'm Skapokon, and we go back to the real world.