Alex Knowles

Alex Knowles, also known by the aliases Tid, Captain Tid, and tid_mg, was formerly a Super Smash Flash 2 developer. He worked on stage design, character programming, character design, and character balancing.

History
Alex Knowles joined the McLeodGaming community through the McLeodGaming Forums under the username Tid on January 3, 2009 to contribute to the repair of the Smash Flash DOJO!!! website, which was unavailable due to maintenance problems at the time. He created his own DOJO!!! website in the downtime, notable for being the only fan-made DOJO!!! website that had official information from developers. He later deleted the website shortly after the official website became functional again, but due to his work maintaining his own website, he was immediately added to a new team for the purpose of maintaining and writing for the newly updated DOJO!!!. Later in the same year, he joined the balancing team for SSF2, where he remained for several months before his promotion to a full developer.

Outside of McLeodGaming, Alex Knowles is a video game developer who runs an independent studio known as TidFriction Games. His first published game, Limiter!, was released on July 1, 2020.

Work with Super Smash Flash 2
Alex Knowles initially joined the development team for SSF2 as a stage artist and spriter, along with being a balancer. The first stage he would create was Castle Wily along with Steven, and he later become the lead developer and team manager for stage development. Other notable stages he has since done work for include Hylian Skies, Clock Town, Crateria, Meteo Campaigns, and Sand Ocean. In addition to designing the concepts, mechanics, and pixel art for stages, he also maintained the full list of stages planned for the game at the time to keep a balanced ratio of casual-focused and competitive-focused stages, as well as balanced representation between universes.

He later became a developer for a wide range of areas as well, including as a character programmer and designer, graphical effect designer, and audio developer. Notably, he is responsible for the moveset redesigns of and  in v0.8 and v0.9 of the demo, respectively, as well as for programming various items, Assist Trophies, and Poké Ball Pokémon. He also assisted in the creation of the opening movie for v0.9.

In addition to developing the game itself, Alex Knowles wrote two Dev Blogs during the development to v0.8 of the demo, these being the second Dev Blog and the second Dev Blog Mini Post. He also attended APEX 2013 and APEX 2014 to assist in the hosting of the Super Smash Flash 2 booth and the livestream, and he later helped to create certain videos on the McLeodGaming YouTube channel such as trailers and the McLeodGaming Direct for Beta.

Starting in early 2013, Alex Knowles had become less prominent as a developer in order to work on his own independent game, Deep, which is currently unreleased. In October 2015, Knowles resigned from the development team due to "professional reasons". Despite this, he still keeps a close relationship with the developers, and on November 27, 2021, an interview between him and Steven was released in which he discussed his previous work for SSF2 and his more recent work with TidFriction Games.