Hi. I’m Noriyuki Otani, and I programmed the Gorgies, Burns, and friendly forces in Vanquish. I thought I would take the chance and write a blog and shed some light on the Gorgies themselves.
When I was creating the Gorgies, our “grunts”, the thing I paid most attention to was how to make sure that people wouldn’t realize that the Gorgies were actually going easy on them.
Going easy on the player might be the wrong way of putting it…
For example, when Gorgies faced off against the player, even though you would expect otherwise, you couldn’t fire upon them before they spotted and fired upon you. Even people who were used to shooters and great at aiming couldn’t do it. The worst would be trading attacks, and if you weren’t any good you would lose the exchange, which is guaranteed to stress you out. At Mikami-san’s suggestion, I tuned the game so that there is a gap before the Gorgies fire. It seems really simple, and I am sure that teams with tons of shooting game experience have plenty of know-how in this regard, but we started everything from zero, so this was just one of the many examples of us falling back on our tried-and-true method of “crash-and-build” development.
The Vanquish that emerged from all of these trials has tons of little tuning adjustments where the “game goes easy” to make things more fun to play. There aren’t very many places in the game where you will actually notice these things while playing, but every place we’ve put in these tweaks, we consider them as an act of love from us to you.
I hope you give Vanquish a whirl and enjoy the hell out of those bloody robots!
If you don’t want any of our love, you can get a real taste for what the robots can do to you by trying God Hard mode. I took great joy in not only powering them up in lots of different ways, but also making sure to remove their limiter. Even though our friends usually end up scrap metal, it would make me really happy if you give this mode even just a short try to see what the Gorgies are truly capable of.
Hello, everyone! I’m Takahiro Fujii, and I am the designer for the graphical user interface (GUI) in Vanquish. The GUI is in this game spans everything from all of the menus, to the heads up display, to the interfaces that Elena uses in the cut-scenes of the game.
Vanquish’s GUI was made at 1280 x 720 pixel resolution. Working at HD resolutions is really a godsend for a designer, because things with high contrast, like text/symbols, can be clearly defined; however, there is a downside to the benefit of having such clearly defined outline around images and that is getting into a situation where the image starts looking bland. I wanted to do something to make sure this didn’t happen in Vanquish, so I made sure to include elements like dirt and distortion, noise, and an abundance of optical effects to make the interface seem a bit blurred and out-of-focus.
While blurring elements meant complicating some of the information displayed, when it came to the size and layout of the HUD, Mikami-san dictated that we needed to take into consideration how much we were throwing up on the screen and how fast the action was moving, as he wanted the player to be able to focus on the gameplay in the game. This led to an extremely functional design.
If you don’t pay attention, you probably won’t be able to tell the difference, as it really isn’t a flashy effect, but the change between putting effects on the interface and leaving things plain is really night and day. I plowed through my work with that belief in mind. Of course, when everyone is playing Vanquish, I don’t want you to even think about what I’ve written about here, and just enjoy the experience. As a creator, that would make me happier than anything.
Hi. I’m Ippei Shiraki, sound designer on Vanquish.
I’ve never worked on an SF title before, so it was kind of a harrowing experience for me. While robots are pretty well known, I would have to say that they are still almost fictional in nature. At least they are to me. Industrial robots are made from combining existing items, such as motors, which means that I’d end up making sounds that sounded like things already in existence. However, the robots that attack you in Vanquish are sentient, and have their own AI. That meant the first order of business was creating more “human” sounding robots from scratch. For creatures that are “alive,” you tend to create sounds by putting effecting/changing up existing animal sounds, but in Vanquish I relied heavily on synthesizers to create something completely different. One of the members of our sound design team really love synthesizers, so I was able to hand off quite a bit of the enemy sound design duties to him. LOL.
Thanks to his effort, our enemies have a new sound unlike anything you’ve heard before.
Sam’s gun was also probably the most important sound in the game… Actually, I ended up having to remake sounds that had already been approved because of some differing opinions from other members of the development team. The important part was to make sure that the sound was pleasing to the ears and something that you didn’t get tired of. Having to remake something that you’ve already created is an incredibly difficult process; however, when you hear the sound in the game, even I must admit that the remade sound was superior to what I had originally. When you are creating something, you tend to put on blinders towards your own work. I realize that these are the times when the rest of the team’s opinions are really important. Not to be singing my own praises, but the heavy machine gun sounds really cool when you are in AR mode.
We more or less as a team approached the game with the main concept that it should be fun to play above all else, and the sound effects work to further this ideal. I really hope that the sounds startle you… and that you have a great time playing Vanquish.
Hello everyone. I’m Vanquish composer Erina Niwa. I’ve been on the Vanquish team for over 2 years now, so my memories of the start of development are a bit hazy these days. However, I’m going to do my best to recall what I can and give you some insider information about the music you will hear in Vanquish.
Vanquish, as you know, is a shooter with strong action and speed elements. As the world of Vanquish is set in a SF imagining of the near future, I realized that the game would definitely need heavy synth elements, and then went to work.
With a lot of Western TPS games, the soundtrack is either rarely used, or when it is used, it seems to lack punch, but one of the things that Mikami-san told me that he wanted for the Vanquish soundtrack was for the music to “be the backup dancers for the game.” As we developed the game, a clear sense of speed emerged, as did the game’s hook, so the background music had to match that. This all lead to the up-tempo, banging soundtrack in the game today.
Even within PlatinumGames, there were those who said that the soundtrack didn’t sound like a shooter soundtrack, but since Vanquish is so aggressive, we made the soundtrack more along the lines of something from an action game. It is a blending of genres, from techno, to industrial, to breaks, metal, jungle, and even some Hollywood style scoring.
Another thing Mikami-san said was, “Make sure it doesn’t end up P.N.03-esque.”
“Make it a battlefield. Make it militaristic,” he added. “The game may look like SF, but the soundtrack should be gritty and war-like.”
Having that SF-style feel of the near future but matching it with grittiness is something that is very hard to pull off at the same time with music, but I took the tracks and genres that we were already working on, and looked at how we could add the grittiness of war into these tracks. Then it was a matter of dissecting these key ideas, and reassembling them as music.
Actually, when I started thinking of militarism, it reminded me of the track that they used in the Advanced Wars commercial here in Japan, and even during production, that track would pop into my head from time to time. Those were the days… But I digress…
The game won’t be released for a little while longer (October 19 in North America, October 21 in Japan, and October 22 in EU/PAL territories), but I really hope you all get your hands on Vanquish and give it a try.
One more thing…
The Vanquish Original Soundtrack will be released in Japan on October 27, 2010. It’s all the intense music from the game, spread across a wonderful three disc set.
It also features tracks from our awesome collaborators on this project, Masafumi Takada, of The Silver Case, killer7, God Hand, and No More Heroes fame, and Masakazu Sugimori, composer on Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (GBA) and Viewtiful Joe (GC) amongst others. At 3990 yen, it is a bit pricey, but once you get great at the game and then start thinking the music was awesome, the soundtrack is the perfect companion!
Hi. My name is Tetsuya Sasano, and this is the first time that I’ve ever blogged, either professionally or privately. I was one of the background designers on Vanquish.
While I’ve been involved in creating stage backgrounds on numerous action titles, this is my first time working on a shooter, so I started out by playing many of the famous shooters out on the market.
After this research period, we entered into production, and Mikami-san had a few things he wanted to make sure we accomplished. The one of the most important of these requests was that the game feels good to play. Alongside the concept of having a speed-infused shooter, this element was something that was an absolute must, and it was also the most difficult request Mikami-san made of us.
The background team at first tried to up the visual quality by devoting large portions of memory to polygon and texture data. However, when we tried to add large numbers of enemy troops on to the screen, the game would slow down (as expected?), and it would degrade the feel of the game.
We also wanted to up the intensity of the battlefield by including plenty of allied characters fighting alongside of you, thus there was no choice but to go back to the drawing board on all of the stages so large numbers of these characters could be on screen.
Luckily, we were able to do our best to cut the fat off the stages without dropping the graphical quality, leaving them lean and mean, and making sure that we didn’t do anything to harm the way the game feels. (Of course, each member of the team had to go through hell to make this happen.)
There is literally a mountain of stories regarding how much work it was to get the stages into shape, but we will have to keep them secret for now, because I don’t want to spoil the fun. Hopefully there will be another chance to give you the inside story.
There are quite a few different stages in the game, so I hope you look forward to what we have in store with Vanquish.
You can expect some battles in the dark, like this one pushing through a tunnel section of the colony.
Hi. My name is Hideaki Nakata, and I was in charge of Vanquish’s PS3 Engine as well as overall engine tuning. I thought I would write a blog entry to give you some insight into the system programming on Vanquish.
So what is system programming? It is actually hard to explain, but it is best described as the foundation of the game. To use a car analogy, it is the engine behind things… This is why we use the term game engine as well. Looking at it from the top down, the system programming is everything to do with the game that doesn’t involve actual gameplay (everything other than the code running the player/enemies, etc.). But still, a bit hard to explain exactly…
For the engine powering Vanquish, I tried focusing on all-out quantity. Shinji Mikami, the director of Vanquish, made a number of requests. “I want the game to look unlike anything else out there! I want our battlefields to have the overwhelming feeling of a real battle.” I realized the only way we are going to pull this off is with “quantity.” More and more enemies are going to have to keep appearing, more and more bullets are going to have to fill the air, bigger and bigger explosions are going to have to ring out… We would need an engine that could pull that off while still keeping the characters and backgrounds rich in detail.
While the Vanquish engine is based on work done on Bayonetta, it was for that reason that we had a lot of work to do changing things for this project. For instance, we completely rewrote the renderer, implementing a technique known as “deferred rendering.” I think the new renderer turned out quite well.
We also tuned the title so that if you play Vanquish on the PS3 or the Xbox 360 you should notice little to no differences. Even the developers on the Vanquish team have a hard time telling the two versions apart at a glance… So no matter which console you have, you have nothing to worry about!
Hi. Takeo Kido here again. I was in charge of effects on Vanquish.
For this blog, I thought I would talk a little bit about Boosting in the game.
One of the unique gameplay elements in Vanquish is the main character, Sam, and his ability to boost at high speed across the stage. Our original development name for this feature was simply “sliding.”
During production, it was said that moving across the stage wasn’t fun, and that we needed something both visually appealing, and relevant as a special gameplay element to spice things up. That’s when we came up with the idea…
“Why don’t we modify the big protrusions around the hips like this, then shove some jets out of the back and have him go flying around! That’d be cool. “
“And if we made it so that jets could fly out of multiple directions, it would be a great excuse to have Sam do some really unbelievable actions that would look visually stunning, don’t you think?”
And so it went…
The effects team went to Sam’s modeler, Hattori-san, who did a great job of adding on the little pluses that we were looking for, and the end result is the Boost function you see now. Making games at PlatinumGames is often like this, where the staff start rolling with ideas and don’t stop until they’ve made their way into the game.
Boost may stand out most for its enabling of high speed movement, but it is also integral when Sam is jumping over things, or when he does other, more subtle, quick actions. Moreover, they don’t stand out as much as the jets on his legs, but Sam also has the same jets on his arms, which allow him to put even more force behind his punches. Kind of like a rocket punch where the hand doesn’t go flying off! It looks like something dangerous enough that if he misused the function of the suit, Sam would end up with two dislocated shoulders.
There are tons of these little details in Sam’s ARS suit. If you are into this sort of thing, keep your eyes peeled!
Hello everyone. Thank you all for reading the blog here. My name is Takeo Kido, and I was in charge of the special effects for Vanquish.
Many of you may be wondering what I mean by effects. Simply put, effects can be something in-game that we render to represent explosions, crashes, fragments, smoke, fire, sparks, jets, lighting, bullets, shell casings, missiles, beams, etc. Basically think of something like that, and you are probably thinking about effects.
So now on to the effects in Vanquish.
At the beginning of the project, the director of Vanquish, professing his absolute hatred for crawling along slowly in games, declared, “We aren’t going to let the player get away with hanging out in cover as long as he likes. We are going to force them forwards.” He added, “The enemies are robots. When you kill them, they blow up. We are going to put as many of them on-screen as we possibly can, especially the grunts.” Those words made me feel like we were going to make a game, that graphically-speaking, would be far flashier than the normal human versus human shooters on the market.
We wanted to have maximum amplitude, so when the bullets are flying everywhere, you’d want to say, “Somebody save me!” Explosions would be booming around you, and shrapnel would be flying everywhere. Alright. Let’s just keep it simple and hit them over the head with volume. Let’s make that the calling card for Vanquish’s special effects. At the risk of causing a misunderstanding, we were going with quantity over quality because in the end quantity would be quality. Of course, if we just went simply with quantity the graphics of the game would suffer, and that would mean abject failure, so we had to aim for a baseline quality level and then open the valves.
I figured that it would make things a bit hard on us, but I’d make due. Once the direction we were going to take was decided, actually doing the work would be the easy part, because any time you’d find yourself against a wall, you could just chose the path of more volume.
However, if I just turned off my brain and increased the number of effects carelessly, the graphics and processing would both take a hit and it wouldn’t let us make the kind of action-heavy game that we were after. It would be up to the programmers and designers in charge to show their skill/combined efforts in figuring out how to either make really expressive effects that were ‘cheap’ to compute, or how to get the most out of the processing budget by making scenes as cool as possible.
As a result of all this scheming and planning, we were able to put really substantial effects into Vanquish. It appears that there is tons going on, both small and large, and in reality, there is a ton going on. Things are flying all over the place.
I’m probably the only one interested in this, but I think the shrapnel in Vanquish is really good. The huge slabs of concrete are nice, but I can’t get enough of the small, pulverized shrapnel flying all over the place or the dirty that is floating through the air.
Even when I am watching a movie, I will say, “That’s some nice debris.” Of course, those around me will say, “I have no idea why you are talking about debris.” But I’m living my job, so I see nothing wrong with it!
So there is a glimpse into how we created Vanquish. If you are interested, definitely give it a play, and get wrapped up into the craziness of everything happening around you. If you get used to Vanquish, other shooters are going to seem downright peaceful in comparison. And of course, when you see all of the little individual sparks, if you could think about our work as effects designers, even if only in your imagination, we would be incredibly happy.
Kamiya here, fresh off commenting on the official After Burner Climax blog in the afterglow of happiness that came when I heard news about the digital release. I still can’t believe that they are really going to port the game! It’s great! You may not know, but I’ve been begging for this gem for ages, as I thought After Burner Climax was the simplest and most effective vehicle for showing people what “next-generation” machines can really do. Having these planes flying in crazy environment and taking out entire formations of enemy planes in rapid-fire, is full of spectacle and “gamey-ness” if you ask me. Now put that up in the big screen TV corner of an electronics store, and that would get even grandma and grandpa to stop in their tracks. You don’t need to make things real! The absurd is amazing! With something like that, I could even get my old man, who might have zero interest in games, to beam with pride and say, “That’s some next-gen goodness.”
So the Xbox 360 version will be 800 Microsoft Points, and the PS3 version will be around 900 yen, which makes me wonder if it is OK to be that cheap. I would have bought it even if it was a full priced, packaged release… I’m going to have to unpack my video projector… I’ve been pretty vehement about saying, “PORT IT!” so now I am going to have to put my money where my mouth is and play this game on like a 100 inch screen.
So, since After Burner Climax is one of our brothers-in-Climax so to speak, make sure you pay attention when it is released digitally this spring. And best of luck to everyone working on the title! Oh, and let’s get working on getting Monster Land up on the Virtual Console or XBLA.
Check out the official SEGA After Burner Climax website:
http://sega-afterburner.com/
Wow, I got a little excited and that ended up longer than I thought… Alright, on to the next topic. Last January 30, we held a party for our fans at an authentic Cantonese restaurant on the 39th floor of our office building, the Umeda Sky Building in Osaka. We called the event Platinum Twilight!
32 fans came for the evening and spend some time with the staff here at PlatinumGames. A good time was had by all. Everyone was very well-mannered, and we didn’t get any “delicate” questions (actually, I kind of wish they had asked us more questions…), so it was a really chilled out evening from start to finish. It was nice to hear some much fervent support from so many people, and it made me feel warm and happy that chose a path for my life that included making games.
Having events like this with our fans is something that we did several times during our Clover Studios days, but having it in the very same building as the studio meant that we just had to make an exception to the rule and give the fans a quick tour of the production floor. Even when it is guests working in the industry, we are especially careful about information leaking, so this was the first time that non-studio guests have been show around the inside of the studio. Right now, we are working hard on Vanquish, which at the time had just been announced, but details had not been released, so even I got a bit nervous leading people around and explaining things to them.
We were only about to show people around the studio for a short period of time, but I think that people more or less got a feeling for the fact that one of the important point to the way we make games is breaking down barriers in our office and communicating with each other. I also think they discovered that we really love toys here. People even saw my cluttered desk… At the least, being able to actually talk with the users we normally don’t even get to place a face on was an incredibly important experience which can’t simply be summed up into a few words.
Of course, we are around to create and release interesting games; however, we are not some sort of “game creating machine. Everyone on the staff are each their own person. Just as when you become interested in one of our games, we are interested in the users who play our creations. Things may change depending on the type of game, its scale, or the people behind (or company) it, but I think that I’d like to make games more like they are a folk craft, filled with the warmth of people, rather than some sort of industrial packaged good. I want to keep holding these types of events, so we can share each other’s true dispositions and get a feel for each other’s humanity, instead of persisting in your stock “producer/consumer” relationship.
It was a little bit hard to figure out when the event ended because of how things were run a bit poorly; however, I am very thankful for all of those who took valuable time out of their lives to spend time with us. Thank you so much! To those fans that weren’t selected to be with us, we plan on holding as many events as we can in the future, so definitely enter to attend the next event if you can.
So here are my notes on the event…
l When Bayonetta came out, I played it for 30 hours straight on the day of release! -> I beat Super Mario World the day the SNES came out.
l So that’s the kind of person who wrote those blog entries…
l Valentine’s Day chocolate
l Sorry that the printing on the overseas collector’s editions Scarborough Fair gun is wrong…
l Bayonetta cosplay! Woohoo!
l Hand-made Scarborough Fair guns are awesome.
l I love Resident Evil 2 -> I’m kinda proud that I think we might have been the first kissing scene between two polygonal characters rendered in real-time.
l I like RE2 more than RE1 -> I’m actually a bigger fan of 1. LOL.
l Make a sequel to Bayonetta! -> If schedules work out…
l Make a shooting game! -> I’m not opposed to this…
l Make Viewtiful Joe 3! -> Anyone actually going to play it? LOL
l Sequel to Okami? -> I did have a story for one in my head, but you know…
l My paragons of gaming are God Hand and Vagrant Story -> I, too, am a devotee.
l I like Devil May Cry 2, too. -> WHAT!?
l I want one of the mini-dolls from Bayonetta -> Please keep putting in requests…
l I want one of the Bayonetta love pillows -> Please keep putting in requests…
l I want Bayonetta’s glasses -> Hehehehe…
l The original arcade version of Nemesis (Gradius) is awesome!
l If you live in Juso, you should try the ramen shop near the station. It’s called Yokanise.
l It’s hard to follow Bayonetta’s story -> Sorry bout that…
That wraps it up for the party, but I have one more thing to report in this post. Since Bayonetta game play commentaries seem to be flourishing online, I thought that I, Bayonetta director Hideki Kamiya, in my infinite lack of wisdom, would try and make one myself. I gave it a shot on the prologue and here are my results.
I made this by myself at home, so pardon my complete lack of excitement, the poor AV quality, and terrible technique. I am mainly talking about things behind the scenes things like incidents during development, hidden background information, etc. If you are interest, please check the videos out. It’s been more than 3 months since the game came out, so I figure that many of you may be getting close to wrapping up the game, so beware that the videos contain spoilers! I’m not normally the world’s most motivated person, so I’m not sure how long I will continue this (LOL), be have fun nonetheless.
Until next time!
Picture: Our concept designer Ikumi made these for my birthday. She designed the dolls for the game, and then she made these by hand! But instead of making Jeanne, she made Zero…
