January's Champion of the Month

Hi YaoYaoYiffy,

Congratulations on becoming the Champion of the Month for January!

It's great to be selected as Champion of the Month! I’d like to thank all the Critters who made this all possible: Excel and Algebra Critters for helping me reverse engineer in-game formulas and put together spreadsheets; and of course, Background-in-Object-Oriented-Programming Critter (I usually just call him “Fred”) for his help with getting the Smashmuck wiki off the ground. But mostly to the other dedicated Smashers of the community that keep the game fun and interesting!

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I’ve been a gamer since I was about 5. I was brought up around the good ol’ NES with classics like Super Mario Brothers, The Legend of Zelda, and Duck Hunt. Since then I’ve picked up pretty much any game of any genre (except sports!) I could get my hands on, particularly shooters, RPGs, and more recently, MOBAs.

Nowadays, I’m a webmaster and admin for a small (but awesome) gaming community (GamerApoc.org), and a Computer Science student (with a potential minor in game design of course!). I’ve come to enjoy using Smashmuck as a way to play around with my studies in the real world (namely, projects like the Smashmuck Wiki and my incessant number-crunching on the forums).

So you’ve been around since July 2012, a week after my birthday actually, so congratulations to the both of us! How did you find out about SmashMuck?

My professor from a game design class sent out an e-mail asking for volunteers to do an in-studio beta test of another upcoming Kiz Studios game (Feed the Muck, very cool game, but that’s another story). I was doing a little background research into Kiz before going into the studio, so I read up on the company, checked out their other games (I AM a veteran of the Muck Wars, I stand up during matches), and stumbled across Smashmuck.

While clearly designed with “kids” in mind, I was impressed by the solid mechanics and clean design of Smashmuck. I won’t go into a laundry list of all the reasons I fell in love with Smashmuck, suffice to say: as a long-time gamer with years of experience and thousands of game-hours played, Smashmuck is a game I love to play and the kind of game I want newer generations of gamers to play!

Who is you favorite champ? *PS. The correct answer is Zert. Minos is also acceptable.*

Sprout. I’m a big fan of high-sustainability playstyles, and Sprout is the only Champion (so far) that has health AND energy regeneration in a great little package. Recent nerfs have really hurt my little friend, but he’s still the most enjoyable Champion for me to play.

I’m also a big fan of Blitz for his incredibly mobile offensive playstyle, Mainframe and Kilowatt for their high-burst skills, and Dr. Jennifer for her awesome transformation mechanic.

What’s your favorite game mode and why?

I could write a 10 page paper on this.

In brief, because Smashmuck doesn’t have in-match leveling and items it can focus on other aspects of gameplay without worrying about all the balancing that comes with leveling and items. I’m kind of a fan of all the game modes, they highlight one of Smashmuck’s greatest strengths.

If I had to pick a favorite game mode(s) I think it would be Conquest and Destroyer. Plunderball favors certain Champions very strongly (leapers who can get up ledges) and it makes it hard for a lot of other Champions to shine. Conquest is kind of the opposite (favoring scrappers who can take and give punishment) but it still lets any Champ participate rather than letting a single super-mobile Champion win an entire match almost solo.

Destroyer is an awesome mode, it’s not the same-old thing you see in every other game of the genre. Destroyer really lets ANY Champion shine. Champs like Rook and Oddilus can run crystals, Scathe and Leatherhead can help fight off the enemy’s robot, Brutus and Minos can roam around the map trying to knockout enemies and steal crystals, etc.

What’s been your best action packed moment while playing SMC?

I had a match a few weeks ago where I solo queued 3v3 Plunderball and got put up against 3 real players. I picked Rook and got ready to lose with my 2 bots against 3 real players.

Instead, I managed to keep grabbing the enemy Plunderball, and then playing a dangerous game of keep-away from the enemy Rook. I kept my map awareness high, kept checking for and grabbing the health and energy pickups, and watching for opportunities to jump in and help my bots try to recapture our Plunderball. After a few minutes our teams were matched 2-2 and we went to sudden death, where my aggressive (lucky!) plays managed to pick up the final point and the win.

That moment, and everytime I dominated one of the Kiz team at their own game during closed beta are my best action-packed moments!

So I hear you’ve been invited to test our new menu and HUD. Other than those two, what feature are you looking forward to?

I’m pretty excited about the crafting system, anything that adds new content to the game is great, even if it means that much more work for the wiki. I like how it opens up ways for players to get access to Champions, skins, and weapons without spending ClobberCoins or Smashbucks.

And, of course, I absolutely live for each new Champion and skill-swap that comes out! There’s nothing cooler than seeing all the new art and skills for an upcoming Champion; the variety of Champs and skills is what keeps me playing!

What advice would you give to new players?

Don’t get discouraged when you hit a string of bad matches. There are a lot of very good, very experienced players in this game and they can Smash pretty hard. The key to any competitive game like Smashmuck is to not give up, don’t get discouraged!

Don’t care about your win/loss record! Just enjoy the game! The more have fun, the more you play; the more you play, the better you get!

Find one of the experienced players and ask them questions, most of them are more than happy to share their knowledge of the game. I know I’m always more than happy to chat with new players whenever I’m in-game (although you may have to private message me if I’m in the middle of something). The forums are another great place to get in-depth advice about the game and get the opinions of a bunch of other players at once.

If you could create any Champion of your choosing, what would it be?

I’d like to see a combo-based melee Champion. I imagine two quick, cheap skills, and one larger skill to finish off the combo. A Champ that gets on an enemy and keeps up with them by spamming cheap skills that apply minor, but stacking, hexes to the target. Then, finish them off with a final skill that dashes to your target, consumes all the stacked hexes, dealing extra effects based off of which hexes are consumed and how many of each.

Thanks for your time and we can’t to have you at PAX East!

For those that don’t know, YaoYaoYiffy has been working on the official unofficial SmasMuck Wiki which can be found here and has created his own SmashMuck Spreedsheet.