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(Originally posted on the Japanese Bayo-blog on December 25, 2009, but withheld due to spoilers.)

Hello, I am an animator here at PlatinumGames. You can call me Nakajo. It seems early, but it is already Christmas, huh? The office building that houses PlatinumGames has an enormous Christmas tree that really sparkles and shines, attracting huge crowds of revelers even on the weekends. This is the third tree that has welcomed the Bayonetta project, but this year things have calmed down, so I was able to look at the tree in a new light. (Don’t ask what it was like before this year…)

About My Role on Bayonetta
I jointed Team Little Angels primarily as an enemy animation designer. The senior animators on the team have already gone over much of the animation here on the blog; however, I thought I would talk a little bit about one of the Cardinal Virtues, Temperantia, and the Infernal Demon summon that finishes off the boss.
(I thought the animators’ blogs were finished up with Uchi’s blog… But I got called in to write one… I’m writing this now half-crying because I just couldn’t figure out what to include…)

When animating the Temperantia fight, I worked making sure to absolutely avoid destroying the sense of scale, all the while paying attention to the sense the heft and speed the fight had. With something as big as Temperantia, getting a sense of heft and scale requires the attack motions to get bigger and bigger, so I had to go through numerous… numerous… numerous… revisions to make sure the attacks didn’t come from off-screen. (If you are attacked from off-screen, you can’t see the locus of the blow, making it impossible to dodge, right?)

Since the main part of Temperantia is SO big during that fight, the boss actually ends up being the stage, and we included various gameplay devices to this end. Some new big of gameplay would be put into the game and then go through numerous… numerous… numerous… revisions. (Again!!)

With the Infernal Demon summons, they would start by deciding Bayonetta’s summoning pose. Uchi-san also posted about the motion capture process in a previous blog, but I would patch things up using some of the stored motion capture data.

However, there is a limit as to how far you can use this data, and having things like “win poses” overlap with each other wouldn’t be good, so it was always a bit of a difficult situation when we’d begin to argue over poses:
“Hey, I’m using that pose already.”
“Really? I’ll look for something else…”

Once Bayonetta’s pose was locked down, I then moved on to how the Infernal Demon and Temperantia would interact. In Temperantia’s case, he is met by the six-armed demon Hekatoncheir. It was consulting with Kamiya-san, who wanted to make sure that this thing was powerful, that we decided to increase his number of arms from two to six. (Huh? He only used to have two… But six is three times as powerful! And three times as much work!! *cries*) During production, I got a really weird sweat and two or three times I thought that my soul might literally escape out of my mouth; however, I was able to finish the product.

Bayonetta is a game that holds many things and memories; however, having users play it and enjoy it would make me happy.

That’s all for now!

SEGA Europe and SEGA America can today announce that an online update will be available on Jan 28th for the PlayStation 3 version of BAYONETTA. This online update allows the game to be installed onto the console’s hard drive which significantly decreases the loading times for the game.

The update will automatically be downloaded to PlayStation 3 when users launch BAYONETTA.

BAYONETTA is available now on Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft and PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system.

Happy New Year, everyone!
I’m the head of the PlatinumGames Weapons Development Division (No. of Employees: 1), Muneyuki “Johnny” Kotegawa here.

I’ve seen on the web lately that some fans have been creating Scarborough Fair and All 4 One models. As a member (and leader) of the PlatinumGames Weapons Development Division, I am quite pleased to see these efforts.
I decided to lend my little bit of support by preparing multi-direction and exploded views of the guns in question. Print them out, line them up, and get a taste of how much fun it must be to be Rodin himself. The charms are also included, so I suppose you may want to make these as accessories as well.

So please accept these as a token of my gratitude, and enjoy your lives as witches!

These images are also available on the PlatinumGames Flickr page.

Hi. I’m JP Kellams. While I normally blog about other things, this time I’d like to talk about my role in the English adaptation of BAYONETTA here at PlatinumGames.

I suppose the first thing that stands out is why I did not use the word localization. Localization is a very software specific term, and while games are software, you have to consider what really comprises the bulk of getting a Japanese game into English. Sure, translating menus and such are classical localization tasks; however, the most important part of the job I had on Bayonetta was taking the compelling script that Kamiya-san had written for the game and getting it into English.

Prior to joining PlatinumGames, I worked on a variety of titles, including the English script for Shinji Mikami’s God Hand, but this is my first opportunity to work with Kamiya-san. In fact, I was a bit intimidated, as it seems to me that the worlds his games encompass exist fully realized in his head, and to deviate even a little would be both a disservice and unacceptable. Yet, one of the lessons I learned from God Hand was that deviation is necessary and productive to adapting these stories into English (especially since God Hand was basically a love letter to obscure 70s and 80s Japanese pop culture). Surprisingly, Kamiya-san was very open to my ideas, and we would collaborate on ideas ranging from character and location names to the little details like what should be written on Rodin’s apron (“I love chicks” with a small baby chick logo). In fact, during translation, Kamiya-san would sit with me at my desk going over my day’s translation work, discussing lines, doing rewrites, and approving/rejecting additions or rearrangements I had made. His time and input really helped me, and it is incredibly rare for that kind of attention to be paid by the Japanese director.

So what were the challenges of realizing Kamiya-san’s story in English? Well, Bayonetta herself presented a number of issues. How would a European witch from 500 years ago talk if she had been exposed to grimy pseudo-American urban culture for 20 years? Kamiya-san was very specific about making sure Bayonetta spoke in a British accent, and while I have a basic understanding of the King’s English, I was blessed with the input of numerous British editors. Also, the Americanisms that would surely come into her vernacular aren’t something that can’t be accounted for in a Japanese script, so I was always thinking of how to incorporate those into her lines.

Then there was the issue of Bayonetta’s character.（Sorry for throwing in my own interpretation…）To me, Bayonetta had to be posh, sassy, and totally aware of herself. When Bayonetta is cheesy, she knows she is cheesy. When she is teasing, she knows she is teasing. Her inner monologue is fast enough to get out the line a normal person only wishes they would have said, and she exudes confidence in everything she does. There is nothing subtle about her, but that is exactly what you want her to be, and she knows it. This proved to be the hardest part of the translation to balance.

To counter-balance her you have Jeanne, who is more reserved, more sinister – an ice queen’s ice queen – with far more going on behind her eyes than you realize. Throw Luka, a not-so-innocent character (he does love chasing the girls), but ultimately a driven, passionate, kind-hearted soul, into the mix and you have the makings for some interesting situations. You also have your full compliment of character types with the child (Cereza), the wise old man (Rodin), the jester (Enzo), and the trickster (I’ll leave this one to your imagination). Kamiya-san’s interesting Japanese script, with its strong characters, and the wonderful direction of Yuji Shimomura, really lent itself to a compelling story. I hope you all enjoy the ride.

There were also copious amounts of in-game text, background text, and non-story lines that had to be translated, and in many cases written in English with Kamiya-san’s direction. They all hold meaning, both literal and hidden, so make sure to look over them thoroughly. This meaning extends to one of my favorite parts of the game, the Angels’ voices. Kamiya-san first asked me to come up with sounds for when Bayonetta would summon demons for her Infernal Demon attacks – something disconcerting but powerful. Research led me to an answer not only for her Wicked Weaves, but also for the Angels themselves. A dead, invented (?) language known as Enochian. Transcribed or invented by mathematician and occultist John Dee, a 16^th century advisor to the English throne, Enochian is said to be the language of Angels. Dee spent the latter part of his life trying to arrive at a universal language spoken prior Babel and the confounding of language. In Bayonetta, we use Enochian in various places. All of Bayonetta’s summons, both torture attacks and Infernal Demons, are triggered by an Enochian phrase, and all the angelic enemies in the game speak in Enochian.

There are few resources for Enochian, other than some simple dictionaries, so I tried to create an idea of syntax and semantics in my head based loosely around interlinear glosses (in this case a morphophonemic transliteration) used in linguistics. Here is an example of how we did things:

Kamiya-san would then go back to my original English translation for all of the lines and rewrite the Japanese subtitles for readability and to match the nuance of the English translation. I think his work here gave the game an even higher level of polish for Japanese users, and was another one of the many times I was happy I could rely on Kamiya-san’s above average English abilities. Thanks for that, Kamiya-san! …Even though he would always get on my case about things! Hehe.

BTW-Here is another bit of Enochian. For Joy’s torture attack, Bayonetta is saying Piadph (in the jaws of [death]). Sorry to disappoint some of our Japanese fans.

So have fun searching the game for Enochian, whether it be hidden in magical seals or spoken by our cast of characters. Next time, I will go more into the dialogue of the game, and introduce you to our outstanding cast of voice actors!

Qaal ovof vomsarg! (More Enochian!!)

Hi. I’m Kenichiro Yoshimura, Bayonetta’s modeler.

Well… Since Bayonetta is now in everyone’s hands one way or another (released in Japan, and the demo is out worldwide), I thought I would pinpoint a few things on the models I created.

First of all, I wanted to go into the differences between Bayonetta and Jeanne.

Even though the bones (the joints needed to make the model move) are shared between the two, and their bodies share the same basic balance…

…Jeanne’s got smaller boobs!

…And a smaller butt, too!

If you lay them on top of each other, this is what it looks like.

It also seems like Kamiya-san is partial to Jeanne. I’m with Bayo on this one.

Next up is Sapientia.

I took the liberty of throwing in some of the things I like and added a liberal amount of mecha elements that weren’t in the original concept design.

These are the exhausts. I airbrushed on some clear blue and some clear orange to give it that distinctive “scorched” look.

The wings are a brake and clutch setup. When Bayonetta summons the Infernal Demon Madama Butterfly, this is what the demon uses to take hold of Sapientia. (At least, that is how I justified it in my head.)

Part of the head is the command bridge of a warship. There is probably an Applaud at the helm with a crew of Affinities manning the ship. (Again, how I justified it in my head.)

There are caution marks around the body. On the wings, it says “NO STEP.” (But you can’t really read it) The wings are structurally weak, so you can’t stand on them. (Another justification off the top of my head.)

The writing above the heads on each of its legs has meaning. This one says System-E in our angelic font. System-E is the successor to SEGA’s System 16 arcade board. (Or so Kamiya-san devised…) I guess you could say that our mecha-angel Sapientia is powered by a SEGA arcade board.

UPDATE: Sorry! The thing about System-E is actually mistaken!! System-E is apparently the arcade version of the SEGA Mark III (Master System)! What I meant to say was that written on Sapientia’s head (now pictured above) is SG-1000000, which Kamiya-san’s set up as the theoretical follow-up to SEGA’s SG-1000 game system. Never the less, Sapientia runs on SEGA hardware. (And the legs are on Mark III…)

So now you have an idea of some of the small details that I was particular about putting in. If you pay close attention to these sorts of places when playing the game, you might find even more new details. Bye bye!

(NOTE: Higher resolution versions of the concept art in this post can be found on the PlatinumGames Inc. Flickr Page)

Hi everyone! I’m Yama-chan, a game designer here.

I was told to write about blog about the game design elements of Bayonetta, so here we go…

Even after we finished work, time passed as I got caught up in anticipation of this and that, but somehow, once I finish something, it seems like I have a disposition to forget what I’ve done. This time is no exception, and I feel my recollections may be rather dim…

That’s why I reintroduced myself to some of the old documents and such that I made. While I was looking at them, I would see things that would make me say, “Oh yeah, we had this!!” So I thought that I’d regret… I mean release these things and everyone could experience some of the trial and error that we went through at the beginning of Bayonetta.

The area around Vigrid Station is 50% larger than the original

The image above is the original size, and below is the same size as the shipping version, or 50% bigger than the upper image. The health bar is also an old version. At the beginning we decided that we wanted to make things real, which guided our decision making on size, but Bayonetta’s actions were much larger than we imagined, and that plan flew right out the window. Thus, we made the change towards bigger areas. Another reason was because we needed extra distance to compensate for Bayonetta’s fast movement and allow us time to load the stages into memory. The image quality differences are due to the implementation of graphical filters.

The Witch Time statues were originally Crystal Skulls

We had planned to let players carry the skull around like a normal weapon, and by pressing Punch and Kick simultaneously, Bayonetta would throw the skull to the ground and activate Witch Time.

We planned to allow Witch Walk in all areas of the game, instead of just limiting it to selected areas

Here is a peek at some of the Japanese design documents from Chapter 2.

The pages above are just pages 6 to 10 pulled from a 13 page design document. Unfortunately, I’m not able to share the full document for some “grown-up” reasons. The historic ruins of the Witch and Sage that appear in the full game was originally a church, and we had planned a stage around it where the player would use Witch Walk to move around the walls and proceed through the level. It was a stage with quite a few puzzles. Whenever we would try to include Witch Walk as a normal mechanic, things would almost certainly head for puzzle-laden territory, effectively bringing down the tempo of the game, or causing other side-effects like filling areas that have no connection to the action with Witch Walk. We kept getting further and further away from our original concept, so we decided to limit Witch Walk to specific situations. I think that Witch Walk, as a gameplay mechanic, would probably best be tried in a slower-paced 3D puzzle game. Oh, I forgot to mention that Shibata-san was in charge of the final Wind (Ancient Ruins) stage. I was in charge of the tutorial, and the opening of the game up until Fortitudo. I also had a hand in an area towards the end, but I can’t share much about it right now because it would be a spoiler.

The Torture Attacks originally went by names like Boredom Breaker, or the Fallen Angel Buster

What can I say, we were all raised on Kinnikuman.

The Witch Hearts were once Blue Orbs

Item names are, surprisingly, pretty all over the place until the very end of production. In-production enemy names usually end up being based on how they look or how we imagine them to be from their concepts, as during development enemies tend to change appearance and the like. When Don-san was writing his blog, he said something along the lines of “I don’t really know the enemy names.” Well, the truth is, I don’t know them either. (Yikes!)

Other than that, we even had ideas for an overworld map at the beginning of the game… But to share it now would definitely be a spoiler, so I will hold off. If they ever put out a Making-Of book, hopefully I will be able to share it with you all then.

I also wanted to share with you some full email conversations with myself and Kamiya-san that we shared while he was on a business trip overseas, but they all got cut out because they said that I was “going too far!” I guess there is such a thing as too long a blog…

So what do you think?

There are lots of ideas that are born and die over the course of a game development cycle, and some of these dead ideas had more significance than others. Spirits also rise and fall. Game development is filled with drama.

Hardware changes and so do the player bases… I suppose you could call it the passage of time. Game design is not just a simple issue of trial and error until you find something fun, as you get wrapped up in not only things like changes in hardware and players, but the many other tasks forced upon you that don’t have anything to do with finding fun. These are both production challenges as well as mental challenges…

But I think we got to this point by always going back to the starting point of “I want to make a fun game!” whenever we hit a wall and questioned whether we could honestly pull this off.

I don’t think that PlatinumGames will change it’s core principle – that of making fun games.

So did you enjoy Bayonetta? I hope you find it fun.

Until next time!

Hi everyone.
I’m Uchi, an animator here at PlatinumGames.

Is everyone having fun with Bayonetta?

I joined the Bayonetta team towards the end of the project, and my main job was working on the in-game animations. You’ve already heard about the player and enemy animations from some of the more senior members of the team, but I’d like to tell you a little about what I was in charge of: the dance movie.

During the game, Bayonetta puts on quite a few of her own magnificent dance shows, but these dances are mainly based off of dance data we motion captured. Motion capture allows us to use computers to play back in real-time data we captured of a real person moving, so we filmed a wide variety of motion capture actors for the game, whether they were dancers, actors, or martial artists, and then matched their data up to a character model/situation in the game.
For Bayonetta, we held auditions, and then found and motion captured a professional dancer who fit Bayonetta to a T. We used this dancer’s data in a variety of areas, from when Bayonetta summons an Infernal Demon to her dances during the game’s cutscenes.

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