They’re playing around, but they’re also challenging themselves in different ways, and good ideas come from that, you know. Hideo: Yeah, but the upside is that from all that joking around during the development, really interesting ideas can sometimes emerge. You’ve got to sit down with everyone at the end and be like: “Confession time! What did you add?!” If you just let everyone be, the results could be scary… -Yeah, and most of the inside jokes that get left in don’t make a lot of sense to outsiders. But if you aren’t persistent as a director in sussing out all these little things, you can easily lose track of what’s been hidden away in the code. This kind of light-hearted joking around has the effect of keeping everyone’s spirits lifted. You know, in a development there’s times when the work is really fun, and times when it’s very difficult. Of course most of it is just done as a joke among the developers. Until I find out about it everyone’s just laughing it up and having fun. Hideo: Well, there have been instances at Konami where the developers have added their own private in-jokes, the kind of thing where if you saw it in a commercial game you’d be like “DON’T DO THIS!”… those things would get discovered only at the very last stage of development. In light of that, do you have any interesting anecdotes about specific things you struggled with? From all that work, only the best ideas were left in at the end.Ī cutscene from Akumajou Dracula 圆8000.
Of course we had a planning stage where we established certain basic lines, but naturally there were times when something we had planned actually turned out to be uninteresting, so we’d revise it, abandon it, or suddenly shift gears with a different idea. That was the process, practically speaking.
We didn’t have some master design plan that we had to strictly follow if someone had an idea, we’d actually try it out, and if it failed we’d discuss how to make it work. Hideo: It was more like the person who created a given scene would present it to the team, and if the reception was negative they’d be asked to go fix this or that, or to shelve the idea. Were those ideas something you all came up with together as a team? The presentation of Akumajou Dracula 圆8000 (the cutscenes, etc) are very visually impressive. It just shows you how different people are, and how developing a game is the task of taking all these developers’ ideas and balancing and shaping them into a final product. In their comments, some people shared thoughts that are the same as mine others of a more technological inclination wrote about that one impressive thing they really wanted to add still others focused on the gameplay. Hideo: Yeah, I mean, there’s a big variety of stuff written there.
I took a quick look at the developer postscript comments you included on the disks, and it seems like a lot was going on during this development at Konami… We didn’t need a bunch of extra staff just because it was the 圆8000, but on the other hand, it wasn’t developed with a skeleton crew either. As for the number of people on the development, we don’t usually give concrete details about that either, but it was about the same as your typical console game development. What I mean is, it takes as long as it takes. Hideo: Normally we don’t give an answer to that question at Konami. How long did Akumajou Dracula 圆8000 take to develop? We paid attention to a lot of little details like that. The sparkles of flame before that part also look smoother with a faster processor. The water in the fountain will flow more quickly depending on the speed of the 圆8000 processor. Ah, like the gears in the clock tower, for instance. As such there’s a few sections where some subtle differences will be apparent to new owners of the 圆8030, like places where the animation is smoother. In the middle of the development the 圆8030 model was released, so naturally we wanted it to work on that system too. Another design concept was to fully utilize the abilities of the 圆8000 hardware, for graphics and so forth.
So while were aware that this would, in terms of its system, be a rather old-fashioned game, throughout the development we kept in our sights the goal of taking the best elements of the Famicom Castlevania. Hideo: First, we all thought that the original Castlevania for the Famicom was the best one. In deciding to release a Castlevania game for the 圆8000, what was your overall design concept?