Filed: Games, MadWorld, PlatinumGames

MADWORLD had started to slowly coalesce as a game for me. I could see its core. However, I still had this nagging impression that we were a bit too rough in how we were handling violence.

I began to wonder… “Hmm… There has to be a way to make this more over-the-top and comical.”

Around the same time, we were preparing the points system that increases a user’s score as their kills become more and more complex and violent. With this system, if there was a way to have someone watch the game and react with comments like, “That was a high scoring kill!” or “If you would have f%&^ed him up a bit more, the score would have been higher,” the user would be able to go after brutal kills or more complex ways of dispatching enemies. They would know instantly whether their actions were being rewarded or weren’t up to snuff. I took this idea to the team, and after much talk and deliberation, everyone came around to the idea of having someone talk during the gameplay, and we decided to add play-by-play announcers to the game.

However, we knew that only having one announcer would seem a bit weak, and wouldn’t really get people excited. So we decided that they should be like Japanese Manzai comedians, with the play-by-play man joined by a color commentator, bouncing lines back and forth between each other as the game played out. I thought that if we could pull that off, we would definitely make the game even more comical. (By the way, Japanese Manzai consists of a straight man and a funny man bouncing jokes back and forth to get laughs.)
So once we were set with our announcer pair, we needed to figure out what they would say. So I went to two important team members, our resident American and Canadian, to figure out where we should go with things, and then we recorded some announcer tests in our in-house recording studio.

Of course, since I don’t understand English, I let them take care of the finer points of writing the lines; however, when they were recording the test lines, they were laughing and having a good time, so I became more confident that we could use this idea to make the game more comical.

Once the recording was done, we put the data into a development build of the game, and presented this version of the game, containing Jack’s gruesome kills with the announcers talking over the action, to the staff of SEGA of America with a bit of trepidation.

They watched the actions of Jack on screen along with the announcers talking away and everyone busted up laughing!! “They are laughing! The announcers work!!” I was able to take my suspicions that it would work and turn it into definite proof. From then on out, the announcers were in the game.

There’s another important purpose the announcers serve in MADWORLD.

The announcers performances help you get into the universe of MADWORLD and understand what it is all about. Jack has joined a murderous game show called DEATHWATCH, which makes this a world completely out of the ordinary. Thus, we needed the announcers to talk during the game to make you feel how different this world is. Even though we had really different graphics and over-the-top ways to kill enemies, I thought that we weren’t getting this across well enough, and we could have the announcers aim to fill this gap.

I gave the announcers some backstories to fill in the gaps.
Announcer 1: He is a man hired by the DEATHWATCH organizers to explain the game. A typical sports announcer.
Announcer 2: A champion of DEATHWATCH, he can add color commentary from the perspective of a former contestant, and follow up on what the first announcer is saying.

With those two characters in place, we could get across the atmosphere of DEATHWATCH and really bring people in and explain the MADWORLD universe. I had the announcer tests work off these character descriptions, and when we went to final recording, the descriptions didn’t change at all. The actors understood my ideas and created their characters.

Announcers are usually only used in “sports games,” like soccer or baseball; however, with MADWORLD, we had a great reason to add them in, and it became another way we challenged ourselves to add the icing on the cake and make the an even more interesting, catchy game. Anyways, that is how I feel about it… But you guys have seen the trailers so far. What do you think?

111714 Comments http%3A%2F%2Fplatinumgames.com%2F2009%2F03%2F05%2Fwhat-madworld-still-lacked%2FWhat+MADWORLD+Still+Lacked2009-03-05+00%3A00%3A17Shigenori+Nishikawahttp%3A%2F%2Fplatinumgames.com%2F%3Fp%3D1117 / / Read More

Filed: Games, MadWorld, PlatinumGames

Hi. I’m Hirono Sato, a game designer on MADWORLD. I was in charge of player interactions, as well as all of the enemies and bosses. I wanted to jump in on the blog and talk about enemy AI for a bit.

Before we get started, one thing you should know about MADWORLD is what it is not. It is not a simple game where you just plow through stages on a single path killing enemies.

We’ve created hundreds of ways to kill an enemy, and you figure out how to use those tools in any way you’d like.
It’s an incredibly free and flexible system.

This freedom is one of the things that sets MADWORLD apart, and that same freedom runs through the enemy AI.

To give you an example of what I mean, it would be the Money Grubber, a briefcase full of money. If you throw this special item at an enemy, they will be drawn in by the money floating in the air, and eventually fight each other in an attempt to get their hands on the cash.

So what happens if Jack walks up to these enemies and gives them a swing of the chainsaw? Or what if he throws a drum filled with gasoline their way? Or what happens when you toss this case onto some busy train tracks? You’ll have to play the game to find out, but I guarantee that you will be laughing in no time!

But that’s MADWORLD… How can we kill this enemy and get a laugh from it? We used that as the jumping off point and made sure the enemy AI served this purpose.

Which means that taking out the cannon fodder, weakest of the weak enemy grunts is not difficult at all. When you have a game where running around killing all the enemies is supposed to be fun, making them so hard that you can’t kill them wouldn’t be fun at all.

So instead, we thought making a game where the difficulty would come from trying to score the highest number of points for a kill. Depending on the kill you use against an enemy, their AI reacts differently, or you might see something that makes you laugh, so you should focus on trying to score as many points as possible.

Of course, there are obviously people who enjoy fighting really challenging enemies. We’ve got you covered inside the stages with the “grunt leaders,” as well as the bosses that appear at the end of each stage. They’ve all got special AI during battle, so you should really be able to sink your teeth into the fight and enjoy the challenge.

So now you know about three types of different AI that we have: grunt, leader, and boss. But even within those groups, each time you play a stage, you can expect to see numerous customized variations on the normal grunt enemies. I’m confident that you all will have plenty to keep you busy.
MADWORLD will be out soon, so there isn’t much longer to wait. Make sure to get your pre-order in, and look forward to the madness that awaits.

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Filed: Games, MadWorld, PlatinumGames

I hope you all enjoyed my blog entry last week, and I’m happy that you are interested in our little game called MADWORLD. I think for this blog, I’ll continue from where I left off with my first post.

Our team developed MADWORLD here in Japan, and almost all of the staff were Japanese. I was constantly worried with the question of how my Japanese team would understand what makes people overseas laugh. It is a tough thing to do, and I worried if they were up to it.

However, as all the foreigners who had seen the signpost or the rose bush would bust up laughing, I came to believe that if we made the game on that level, other people overseas would be laughing with us as well. That’s when I instructed the team to, “Create gameplay situations and cause user reactions that we think are over-the-top, but don’t ever aim to get laughs!”

Why? Because I’ve never heard of a Japanese comedian think of some kind of gag that will get laughs overseas and have it actually work out. I thought that if we as a group simply don’t get what is funny in these cases, we shouldn’t be trying to get laughs, because we will just end up making something that falls flat.

In truth, the reaction to the signpost from the team was awful. Everyone thought it was mean-spirited and left a bad taste in their mouth. However, I think that was just the standard Japanese reaction to things. When foreigners saw it, they laughed out loud. Their completely opposite reaction, that over-the-top brutality = laughs, was the moment I really realized that people, countries, and cultures are truly different. So it would be pointless for my Japanese team to suddenly declare, “We are going to make a game that makes westerners laugh!” What I did think was that we could make what had already gotten laughs the focal point and began to imagine what else might get laughs. So that’s what I told the team to do.

I figure for the non-Japanese who have read this far, a lot of you must be thinking, “What is really so brutal about this game, anyway?” That is the difference in reactions that I was discussing. Of course, I’m the only member of the team who thought the signpost was funny… Maybe I’m not really Japanese after all.

And now for something completely different… Some users on a site (NeoGAF) got organized and made some MADWORLD posters. I was really surprised by how awesome the design sense was. The other thing that shocked me was just how many posters they made.

Everyone took time out of their day and tried their hardest to make a cool MADWORLD ad. It really shot our motivation through the roof and made the team and I want to make an even better game for everyone out there! Thank you all so much for making these!!
(The poster below is the one I thought was the best out of all the designs!)

By the way, have you guys checked out the first episode of PGTV? I was interviewed for the first episode, and one of the questions was what were my favorite games… But it seems like I forgot to mention number 1! I think I screwed it up because I had a couple of drinks and I haven’t been playing Brain Training on the DS lately. So now is as good a time as any… My favorite game is… Grand Theft Auto.

I started playing GTA with GTA3, but then went back and played everything before and everything after. Right now I am playing GTA4. When I was at Capcom, I worked on the localization of GTA Vice City Stories for the PSP.

What makes GTA appealing to me is probably something so obvious I don’t even need to explain, but that is the amount of freedom in the game. It is so much fun! Even MADWORLD references elements of GTA’s level of freedom in its gameplay as well as in the on-screen map we use to help you get around. Of course, MADWORLD isn’t nearly as expansive a world as GTA, but I’d like to think that we’ve made a Wii game with the most amount of freedom found on the system. Everyone pick up a copy and enjoy our own special brand of freedom!

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