Chaos Code is coming out in North America for PlayStation 3 soon. Like Super Cosplay War Ultra, FK Digital created a cast of interesting characters like Bravo, a chef that cooks his opponent in a wok, an android that goes to high school, and an otaku. How did FK Digital come up with these characters? That’s what Siliconera asked FK Digital.
I think the cast of characters in Chaos Code makes the game standout. Where did you get the idea for wacky characters like Bravo and Hikaru who is an otaku?
Mickey Lin, Producer: It takes some guts to design wacky characters. That’s not what people usually do. Most of the time, anime and comics have cool-looking male characters as protagonists. People gravitate to those types of characters. We were really worried how players would take to these wacky characters, but their response proves that we’d made the right decision.
It all goes back to our experience developing Super Cosplay War Ultra. SCWU is a game filled with cutesy characters and funny anime scenes. We care more about if players are having fun playing our game than working on balancing combat. If you successfully execute a combo, you will feel like you it is a huge achievement. The player against you may admire your skill and spectators may cheer for you. But, for those who don’t know about fighting games, they won’t feel anything. All they know is you won the bout. We want people who aren’t gamers and people who just watch someone else play to enjoy our game too.
Of course, we still have handsome guys and pretty girls in this game [laughs].
Michael Lin, Director: We get inspiration for character design by the people we meet everyday and created exaggerated versions of them.
We imagined how these people were intensely focused on their profession. The attack moves they use when they need to fight that are inspired by their job. A passionate chef who brings his cooking skills and kitchen appliances to battle, a fired up anime fan who fights as if it’s the last fight, and a teen comic creator who dresses up to attack enemies – these characters are influenced by anime. I’m sure players can tell the moves these characters use are fueled by their passion of their jobs and hobbies. What makes these characters interesting is how they exaggerate their passion.
Which character is your favorite?
Mickey: [shouts] I love Rui the most!
Ever since I started developing games, I always like designing high school girl characters. This archetype feels young and energetic. Especially after I saw a female character that is a “combat expert in high school” in a fighting game, it made me want to create a high school girl character even more.
This is the design for Gucci. I created this character for a free-to-play PvP game a while back.
Can you tell us about some designs or ideas for characters that didn’t make it into Chaos Code?
Mickey: Well, the game is set in the near future. When we were planning the game, every one of us drew whatever they wanted to make and we started from there. Most of the designs that we dropped either didn’t match the world setting or lacked personality.
You asked a couple questions about Bravo. Every fighting game has a wrestler-like character. We also had one when we were planning for Chaos Code. This was a design we made for a wrestler.
But, that’s not what we want. This kind of design is straightforward and lacks originality. We wanted to make all characters you can play as in Chaos Code are interesting ones. Of course, we dropped more characters besides the wrestler and maybe we can bring some of these cut characters to life in the future. Actually, my favorite character, Rui, was once cut.
Cait & Sith has an interesting fighting style with two characters tied together. What inspired this character’s fighting style?
It goes back to having unique characters with personality to them. Cait & Sith are not common in fighting games, and even if there are twins in other fighting games those characters are not a single fighter. As siblings, Cait & Sith are really close and the concept art we drew shows them holding hands while walking. Their attacks were inspired by this picture.
We want our chef to fight like a chef. Because all of our characters are brimming with personality, we want our twins stand out in the crowd. When designing moves for Cait & Sith, we looked at a lot of sports where you play in a two person team such as doubles in tennis when we designed the moves for the twins. There are quite a few moves that we didn’t include in this game, we might save them to use in the future.
Siliconera will have more about Chaos Code close to the game’s release in North America.
