Half Minute Hero: The Second Coming is coming to the west via Steam for PC on April 4th. The PC version of the game features a number of enhancements over the original, such as 4-player multiplayer, the ability to share maps across the world and more.
Siliconera caught up with producer Esteban Salazar for a brief chat about the game, as well as Marvelous’ plans to bring more games over to PC.
How well did Half Minute Hero do on Steam?
Esteban Salazar, Producer: I can’t give you exact numbers but it did very well relative to its cost. It was sort of an experiment for Marvelous to test the waters on Steam and see if we could succeed there. We did and so now my schedule is full trying to bring more games to Steam.
Who did the English localization for Half Minute Hero: The Second Coming? I noticed the screenshots and saw the characters all have the “yu” prefix which is like the yusha joke.
We outsourced it to a translation company we trust and then edited it in-house to match the awesome tone of the first game that XSEED set with their translation. We tried to keep names consistent across the series, but I may have missed a few!
Part of the charm of the first game was all the RPG humor. Can you tell us more about the jokes in the game and the script? What scenes stuck out for you?
The second game takes the lampooning to a new level. It riffs on everything from Dragon Ball Z to the Virtual Boy. I don’t have a particular scene, but my favorite character is definitely the Time Goddess. She’s hilarious.
I don’t know if you know this, but both games have pretty severe character limits. This makes writing the English text a lot harder because you have to truncate a lot. XSEED knocked it out of the park with first game with some really silly, yet brief dialogue and item descriptions. We were able to expand on that a bit with The Second Coming, and I hope we did ok.
How difficult was it to convert HMH2 from PSP to Steam? Is this a process Marvelous can see doing with their other titles? It seemed like adding in 4-player online multiplayer was a significant addition.
This go-round, we had a wizard of a programmer on the game named Bernhard Schelling. He had it working on the PC in about a week and started adding features that I didn’t even think of!
The flexibility of Steamworks was a big help for adding support for things like multiplayer and the map maker, but Bernhard was the guy putting it all together. It was a dream to work with him and Nick Nomura at OPUS. They really deserve all the credit for the quality of the PC version.
As for the second part of your question, it’s more often a contractual issue or a lack of interest from a developer that prevents us from bringing a game to Steam. I very much want to put as much of our catalog on Steam as we can, but it’s often out of my hands.
Hey Siliconera readers, if you came this far you must be curious about the Half Minute Hero series. Why not give the first game a try? We’re giving out Steam codes for Half Minute Hero: Super Mega Neo Climax Ultimate Boy in a secret Code Giveaway page. Grab ’em fast and we’ll update it with more codes throughout the night.
How has the Goddess Room been improved over the PSP game and what other new features are there for PC?
We’re working on adding high-res art to the Goddess Room for after launch (I just rediscovered the assets) and we added the ability to listen to Qoo’s song and watch the lyrics scroll while she sings to you. There’s also a benchmarking feature that tells you if your wood PC can handle the power of the Goddess.
Does Marvelous have an in house PC team now? Is porting your rather deep library of titles to PC a strategy or are you looking to partner with developers like you did with Lab Zero and Skullgirls?
No, we don’t. The Steam team at Marvelous is just me right now, but I’m hoping to expand and get more of our games and titles from other developers on Steam. As I said before, it’s often a non-technical issue that gets in our way when trying to get our games on PC, so for now I’m trying to get out MAQL titles we can publish and find titles from other talented developers like Lab Zero or other smaller developers.
If you are reading this and your project needs money, get in touch! I honestly dig Steam in a big way and want to put out as many cool games on the service as possible.
