Questions:
Q1: How did Project M get started?

Project M began as a project to test the limits of what we could do to brawl. I had spent a lot of time on the Brawl+ project and learned a fair amount of coding, but as I had transitioned from college to the working life I didn't have time for B+ anymore and began a pet project to see if I could rebuild "Melee Falco" from scratch. As I developed melee falco more and more,  others were interested in the idea of pushing the envelope with regards to brawl hacking, and loved the idea of reinvigorating an evolution of melee and brawl play. We formed an early team including Dantarion, Shell, Camelot, and I where we began paving the way for Project M.

Q2: How many people currently work on Project M?
    -Is this your first game project?

Currently we have around 15-20 active coding contributors to the project on our development team. We additionally have another 20 or so individuals of whom provide constant feedback on the builds. For several of us, this is not our first gaming project as we have been involved in brawl hacking for a long time. We really have used this experience to try and build as professional an interface and experience as possible, and are really happy with the product.

Q3: Why emulate Melee's style?  Why not just simply play Melee?

To put it simply, we feel that Melee has incredible depth and excitement. It was one of those games that you could have a few great players nearby that you could just play for hours on end that we simply couldn't with Brawl. In fact,  to this day, I feel a lot of gaming communities severely underrate components as a fighter. It has a very deep metagame and nostalgia that we wished to grow the idea of "fast, technical gameplay" and apply it to Brawl, which we realize had a really rich cast of characters we could expand this style to.

This leads me to the answer of your second question: Why not just simply Melee? The answer is an obvious one, look at our character select screen! This isn't just a melee clone, its an evolution of melee. We have entirely new character metagames, with characters that performed poorly in melee becoming buffed, and to add onto it, entirely new characters as well. People that haven't played a melee-esque sonic or snake (as examples), don't know what fun they are missing!

Q4: As we all know, Melee was not particularly well balanced, especially with the addition of wave-dashing (which threw everything out of order).  Some characters, like Bowser, lacked a quality wave-dash and found it hard to compete against Star Fox and other quick characters.  Since you're tweaking existing characters to fit with the new style of play, is balance a priority and will characters that can't dash well receive something in return?
   - Do certain characters simply not mesh well with the new mechanics?

The project m team has a strong concern for making characters viable in our engine. It's funny that you mentioned Bowser as a character, as he is one of the characters that I think we (and our fans) are most excited for. A lot of these characters didn't need significant adjustments to make them viable, but some tweaks here and there to truthfully make them a force to be reckoned with. To give examples: Bowser had a hard time cutting through those fast, combo oriented characters such as falco, fox, or falcon. We have designed bowser to be that slow powerhouse he is meant to be, but he embraces brawl's new mechanic of Super/Heavy armor where on his shell-based moves he has tight windows where he can ignore the knockback on certain incoming attacks and proceed to deal some significant damage.

This reinforces my point on the previous question, of why not just play melee? Characters like bowser have a ton more flavor, depth, and potency. Now not every character is going to play exactly the same. Certain characters (namely from brawl), needed to have their movesets partially redesigned to fit into this fast paced, aggressive environment. A clear example is Snake, who's brawl metagame relied largely on camping, his disjointed uptilted kick, and using grenades. We didn't want him to just sit back and camp all day, we wanted him to have depth to be able to do mind-gamey combos where he can make use of placing C4 on opponents in a combo, or controlling the stage with grenades, mines, and more. While this was a lot of work, it made for an incredible product and one of the most fun characters in a game I've ever played.

Q5: Of all the characters, which was the most difficult to reinterpret or adjust?

I partly answered this question before, but it was definitely Snake thus far. However, Olimar and Ivysaur will be difficult to adjust as well.

Q6: The easiest?

Sonic transitioned almost seamlessly into the PM physics engine. We just had to speed up a few moves here and there to give him the true speed you'd expect from sonic, but he plays absolutely amazing.

Q6: I was reading a bit about the changes to Super Mario, and how Melee Dr. Mario was an inspiration.  Will all characters be given new moves properties?
       -What about new moves?

Mario is a character who is meant to be a jack of all trades. However, his moves didn't quite bring him to that level, so we merged his attributes of combo game across melee mario and dr. mario, and came out with a beastly character which had potent kill moves, and significant combo potential. While his overall structure isn't radically new, these alterations have made him a crazy fun and deadly character.

Q7: I also see some new stages are being added.  Could you tell us a bit about the Castlevania level?
       -Will you be adding more original content?

We have added a lot of stages to our build, and plan to continue with more. We have helped develop a number of melee and 64 throwbacks using models and data directly from their game, so a lot of "old favorites" not included in brawl have made their glorious return. Additionally, we have some custom content that will be limited to Project M only. Castlevania is a great example, which features dynamic platforms that will rearrange as the fight goes on. Definitely stayed tuned for any other new custom content.

Q8: On the NeoGaf Info post, it's mentioned that adding new characters might be an option in the near future. Do you care to elaborate?

Dantarion has pioneered a method called the "Clone Engine" which is designed to enable the addition of entirely new characters to the game without any trade-offs. The clone engine isn't quite complete yet, but mostly works on simple characters (i.e. no projectiles). We have a big "?" on our character screen on our site, so hopefully people get excited about who it could be!

Q9: What new additions are you most proud of?

This is hard to say, because its all pretty amazing. The fact that we rebuilt most of the game engine, completely redesigned animations and characters, built new stages from scratch, and so much more makes it pretty much impossible to choose.

Q10: Best case scenario, what would you like to see happen with the project?  Wide spread tournament play, perhaps?

Best case scenario: Nintendo hires the PM team! Haha, while that may be a pipedream, it would be awesome to see Project M flourish. It's not a game to be played only by tournament players, any player can pick it up and enjoy it (and I think many will)!

Q11: Finally, is there anything you want to say to those individuals who feel that Brawl is fine the way it is?

If they enjoy Brawl, great! But, I ask them to keep an open mind about trying out this mod. We aren't pushing it down their throats, but I think we offer a ton of new, professional, and most importantly fun content that any player can enjoy.

Thanks again for having us, and feel free to send back any additional questions.

-Shanus & the PMBR