Harvest Moon creator, Yasuhiro Wada, has his own company now, called Toybox Inc. Prior to establishing it, Wada worked at Marvelous, where he oversaw a number of the company’s projects, including Deadly Premonition, developed by Access Games, of which he was the executive producer.
In a recently-published talk with Deadly Premonition director, Hidetaka “SWERY” Suehiro, Wada discusses the origins of the game, as well as a few of the changes that were made to it, due to feedback from “overseas”. One of these involved changing the protagonist from a female lead to the final male lead, York.
“At first we were considering a female FBI agent as the main role, but after receiving some input from overseas we changed it to the male character that’s in the game now,” Suehiro reveals. “We listened to a lot of advice from overseas and since I play a lot of non-Japanese games I wasn’t so opposed to much of the comments.”
Suehiro continues: “However, what I am picky about is the story and the gameplay so when we heard that we should add some gun shooting aspects to the game (probably marketing advice), I wasn’t so sure. With hindsight, I guess the game was seen as a kind of twist on the survival horror theme so perhaps they weren’t completely wrong to suggest it.”
Wada and Suehiro also tease that they have two more unannounced game concepts lying around. One of these is a “new concept for a mystery horror game” by Tomio Kanazawa, one of the Toybox staff. Neither one is confirmed to be in development yet, but Wada and Suehiro hope to work on them together. Perhaps one of these is the “surprising and amazing” news that Suehiro recently teased?
Prior to that, however, Wada and Suehiro are working on Deadly Premonition: The Director’s Cut, which is slated for release in March 2013.
