Koji Igarashi and the developers of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night still have a lot of work and early 2018 will be here before long. That said, the creators are considering a “staggered model” for releasing content.
Castlevania series producer and Bloodstained creator Koji Igarashi shared some of his thoughts in a recent interview with App Trigger. Here are some points of interest from the recent discussion:
App Trigger: You’ve been working in the video game industry for more than a quarter century, yet it’s been just a few years with the Kickstarter process. What has been the biggest new challenge that the Bloodstained team has encountered that may not have appeared before approaching the backer system?
Koji Igarashi: The biggest difference in working with a large company before starting a Kickstarter is that everything was there already. All the employees, all the talented people, a group of people that are there to run the business was already there for me, so I was able to focus on developing a game.
This time, I started out my own company, starting a Kickstarter, and everything has to start from scratch. I had to find people; I had to find developers. It was challenging to find these developers that could work on this game, and just trying to run this business myself; everything was a challenge.
In the most recent edition of Bloodstained, we’ve seen a noticeable improvement in the depth of environmental design within a 2.5D scale. Not only is there a layer in the foreground, but you see several layers of the background moving in parallax. Tells us more about the importance of detailed background environments when making a 2.5D game such as Bloodstained.
Koji Igarashi: What we wanted to do, since it’s 3D, we definitely wanted to add depth. We wanted to rotate the screen as much as we could to take advantage of the 3D aspect. But what we really wanted to do was make a 3D game with a 2D gameplay style.
In order to do that, a lot of 3D side-scrolling games have a very dark foreground and then a very light background. If you think about very old-school 2D games or pixel games, you see a lot of the foreground being very bright and the background being very dark. We wanted to incorporate that in this 3D environment from Bloodstained to actually show those 2D elements from old-school games.
Can Nintendo Switch owners expect a similar level of background detail as the platform shown off in the trailers?
Koji Igarashi: Currently, we’re not in the middle of porting to Nintendo Switch just yet, but we are starting porting to PS Vita. In comparison to that porting process, we feel confident that the environments will look pretty similar, but we can’t say for sure until we really look into the Nintendo Switch specs and see what it’s like building a game for it
How has the decision to release Bloodstained content using a staggered model affected the development of the game’s intended content down the road?
Koji Igarashi: Right now, nothing is very set for Bloodstained yet. We are considering a staggered model for released content. We know the benefits of it; having content released separately, from time to time, also generates hype from having fans think about the game for longer. This is something that we haven’t really set yet, so it’s something we’ll have to discuss later.
Read the rest of the interview here.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is set to release in early 2018 for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch.
