Regarding Blast Man's feedback

If you're reading this, you're probably aware that yesterday, we posted an announcement showcasing Blast Man's inclusion in version 1.6 of Mega Man Maker. The feedback we got was more negative than we had hoped, however, and we believe that this is in large part because of misunderstandings regarding our vision of the game. In this post, we would like to elaborate on this vision, specifically boss selection and art style, to clear up any confusion.

The most common complaints we've received is that we're adding "yet another explosion-themed Robot Master". To set the record straight: no, we are not biased towards explosion Robot Masters; the larger-than-usual amount of them is a coincidence caused by our actual selection criteria. When considering bosses for the game, the most important aspect is flexibility. By flexibility, we primarily refer to how the boss interacts with non-standard boss arena designs. In Mega Man Maker, players have the freedom to completely customize the environment the boss is fought in, which allows for more creativity than the standard box design would. Naturally, we want bosses to be able to make use of this feature: they should have the ability to traverse terrain effectively, and they cannot rely on arena-specific gimmicks. In Blast Man's case, his far-reaching jumps, fast movement speed, wide range of attack and his ability to fire bombs in the player's direction made him a very good fit for this purpose.
A Robot Master's theme is almost entirely aesthetic: whether they shoot fire, ice, bombs or energy shots at you is only relevant for very specific gimmicks, with many elements having no gimmick interactions at all. We want to include bosses that players can use creatively, which to us is much more important than how they look aesthetically. And if an explosion Robot Master truly does not fit your level, you still have about 25 other bosses to choose from.
Many complaints about this "explosion craze" also included suggestions (sometimes even demands) for other bosses to add to the game or even replace Blast Man. More often than not, this included bosses that do not work well with flexible boss arenas. We hope that this post helps people think more carefully about the bosses they expect to see. A boss may be fun to fight in their original game or its theme may not be common in Mega Man Maker, but that does not mean it would work well in a maker game: a lot more needs to be considered.

Another, somewhat less common but still prevalent criticism we received is related to Blast Man's animations. People have claimed that they look too smooth compared to regular 8-bit Mega Man. This is completely intentional. Our goal for the art style is not to make it look NES-accurate, but to make it look as good as possible while still resembling classic Mega Man. Blast Man is not the only example of this: checkpoints, Grenade Man and many other graphically demade assets are too smooth for the NES to realistically handle, but again, that was never our goal. We believe Schmidkalkan did a fantastic job with Blast Man, and we will not cut animation frames to make it look more NES-accurate.

We don't expect everyone to agree with our vision: if you don't, that is completely fine. However, this vision made Mega Man Maker what it is today, and it is one we won't change. We hope that this post made people more aware of our vision, and that it will be kept in mind for future feedback.

- Mega Man Maker team