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Developer interviews

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Developer interviews

Unread postby icycalm » 28 Nov 2007 19:00

Yuzo Koshiro on RPGFan:

http://www.rpgfan.com/features/intervie ... ndex2.html

Choice quote:

Q: Ancient is not only composing game music, but also planning and developing games. Looking at a list of games you have planned and/or developed thus so far, most of the games are action or action-oriented games. Do you have any interest in not only scoring RPGs, but also planning and developing them?

A: Because I love action games, my company's titles have turned out to become a line-up [of action games]. Of course, I also have an interest in developing RPGs. However, the fact that developing an RPG takes a huge amount of time is problematic.
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icycalm
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Re: Developer interviews

Unread postby icycalm » 05 Aug 2021 04:34

Shinichi Hamada – R-Type and Metal Slug
http://www.onemillionpower.com/shinichi ... etal-slug/

Image

BClarkOMP wrote:Well then, let’s talk about R-Type. You say that it changed your life…?

(Hamada) To be honest, I liked R-Type so much that I joined Irem in 1991! (Laughs)

That’s amazing.

(Regular Customer) How wonderful!!

So then were you still a student when you got so into R-Type?

(Hamada) That’s right. At the time my parents had just just moved us from Hiroshima to the Kansai region for job reasons, and I was in cram school to study for entrance exams. I went on to enroll in a computer trade school after that, but you couldn’t specialize in game development like you can now. I had to struggle with learning assembly at an industrial school instead. Of course I loved games and went to arcades, and I even worked part time at Sega Hi-Tech Land! (Laughs)

The perfect pattern of loving games and working at an arcade! (Laughs) But you were going to a trade school for computers, so you were already hooked.

(Hamada) I was persistent during my career consultation session that I wanted to join a game company, which made my teacher very worried! (Laughs) It was the Kansai area, so there was Capcom and plenty of other game companies around to choose from. But I wanted to make a shooting game like R-Type, so Irem was the only choice for me.

And then they actually accepted you, that’s amazing.


BClarkOMP wrote:(Hamada) There were a lot of amazing people, but the one that sticks out most is naturally the graphic designer, AKIO. This is a conversation I heard from a senior employee while I was there, but apparently AKIO figured out designs and coloring on paper first, and then drew them out as pixel art. And by doing that he was very particular about the intermediate color between the pixels when comparing them to the illustrations he did on paper. I guess he’d use the blur created by the CRT monitor to reproduce the intermediate color accurately, and used the thought process of determining colors a half pixel at a time when drawing them out.

To think that he’d even put effort toward trying to reproduce the illustrations. He’s truly a pixel art craftsman.

(Hamada) AKIO wasn’t in charge of the designs for In the Hunt at first. The player originally controlled a much more futuristic looking submarine. Development ended up being difficult for various reasons, and the programmers weren’t getting any work thrown their way for several months. I also heard this from the same colleague. At that point AKIO was made the main designer, and the design work was finally completed about a year from when the project started. I saw In the Hunt in the programmers room while it was being worked on, and I was really surprised by the quality of graphics during the part in the second level where the buildings are getting blown up. And every other person who saw it there couldn’t stop talking about how amazing it looked. Everyone in the company noticed the quality of AKIO’s pixel art as well, and I think a lot of other people were inspired to do their best because of his work. I also heard that AKIO’s portfolio when he joined the company included Dobkeratops, the stage 1 boss in R-Type. Isn’t that amazing?

That is amazing. At the time I felt that the graphics in R-Type took things up a level from those of other shooting games. They just felt so high quality.

(Hamada) I felt exactly the same way. AKIO’s graphics in R-Type were so exciting: Machines were fused with disgusting aliens, and even the machines themselves felt like they were dirty. His use of color is one of a kind.

And it moved so smoothly too.

(Hamada) For example, the hull on the R-9 tilts smoothly when you’re moving up and down, which heightens the sense of realism even though they’re only 2D graphics. It’s very detailed work. There was a culture at Irem of programmers and people in other positions getting more detailed in response to the highly detailed work that was happening here. ABIKO was the person that did the level design for R-Type, and unfortunately he’d quit by the time I joined Irem. R-Type’s level design and method of play are so brilliant, and it’s so interesting no matter how many times you play it. It’s so deep that you can speed run it with some practice, and that’s the result of such detailed work. I call that kind of craftsmanship “invisible planning”, but Irem’s developers really familiarized themselves with their player base. I saw that invisible planning put into action so many times in order to get people to play their games, with my own eyes. I learned a lot from that, and I’ve continued to keep it in mind for the game development I’ve done afterward. They say that “the devil’s in the details”, and I feel that’s particularly true for R-Type.

I see. So that’s what fascinated you so much about R-Type.

(Hamada) That’s right. Incidentally, what does our regular here like about R-Type?

(Regular Customer) Let’s see…There are a lot of things, but the highly detailed planning that went into it, as Mr. Hamada was just saying, makes it such a unique game. That’s probably the thing that I like the most. For example, the movement of the Bits: They move slightly later than when the ship itself does. It’s like they’re attached to the ship with a rubber band or something. And since there’s inertia to that movement, you can move the R-9 around in such a way that you swing the Bits around, and they get further away from the ship. Using that technique, you can take out the guns underneath the level 3 battleship while you’re at the very bottom of the screen. When I first realized this, it felt like I’d really been deceived! It’s so much fun.

(Hamada) Definitely. If you stay on the very bottom of the screen and move the stick down, you can make the Bit more forward just a little bit. Then you can soak up all of the enemy attacks, together with the Force.

(Regular Customer) The movement of the Bits can keep you from dying on the last stage! (Laughs)

(Hamada) You can take advantage of those fine details, all depending on your movement. Even though it’s full of good game design sense, I like the modesty it has of not putting it front and center, but rather making the player find it.

The more you notice it, the more you grow to like it and get charmed by it. R-Type is full of that kind of appeal.


BClarkOMP wrote:Sleeping at the Office and All Nighters, We Were Able to Give it Our All Because it Was All So Much Fun! Days of Sprinting at Full Speed

(Hamada) While working on Metal Slug, I felt like I couldn’t hold the rest of the staff back since I was working with people I’d looked up to and that had worked on my favorite games. We all slept at the office three days a week: We’d work until 5 in the morning, and then just go under our desks and sleep in our futon or sleeping bag! (Laughs)

Ahh, that was something people only really did back then. (Laughs)

(Hamada) It’s an unthinkable thing to do these days, right? (Laughs)

(Regular Customer) That happened no matter where you worked back then! (Laughs)

(Hamada) But our days of doing that were so much fun. And because they were so fun, we put everything we had into creation and dedicated all of our time to figuring things out. It felt like we could make up ground no matter how many mistakes we made, and we were accumulating knowledge from the good and the bad. It really improved us all. And most of all we were all weirdos that loved games, and that made it so much fun. This was from our time at Irem, but we’d punch out and stay until 1 AM just playing games. Someone would say “I wonder what the range on the Nintendo Super Scope is?!”, so we’d keep firing it, backing up 1 meter at a time. And we all just lost it when we found out that the limit on it was 12 meters! (Laughs) Of course we didn’t always do things like that, just some of the time.

(Laughs) The point here being that you did it because it was fun.

(Hamada) Right. Staying overnight at the office for work and messing around made it like we were in a boarding house, like it was the day before a school festival or something. It was all so much fun. For whatever reason, I can concentrate better when it’s 3 AM or so. Companies don’t endorse those sorts of practices these days, but I feel that if you experience even just a night or two of it, it may be useful to your creative process.

(Regular Customer) You can really focus at night when you’re staying over at the office, right? There’s no project plan, so you can just create whatever way you want! (Laughs)

(Hamada) I know what you mean! (Laughs) The next day I’d just say “I made this last night, so let’s put it in!” (Laughs)

(Regular Customer) Since you’re doing what you want and soaking in the feeling that the night brings on, it really gets your engine going.

(Hamada) Yeah, and it made me really happy that the stuff I made during those times got into the games. All nighters and sleeping over at the office were tough, but they were fun.

What a great conversation. The valuable true nature of creation may be found somewhere here.

(Hamada) That’s true. I really am glad that I joined Irem during that time period. I still look up to all of the senior employees there, and I think that I had an amazing chance to learn a lot of important things from being there. AKIO was the person who stood out the most, but there were a ton of other people with very distinct personalities too. They were all full of variety, and were nothing but a bunch of weirdos! (Laughs)

(Laughs)

(Hamada) They were a crew of people for which creative high quality games was a given. There were also a lot of people who loved joking around, which may have been their Kansai nature coming out. I think they were a bunch who loved to laugh and fool around.

And you’re carrying all of that forward.

(Hamada) That’s right. I learned a lot of important things.


My whole life I've pretty much worked how these guys worked, including my studying at my university years. Only difference is I work alone at home.
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icycalm
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