In a recent episode of the Mighty No. 9 podcast, Takuya Aizu, President and CEO of Inti-Creates discussed the studio’s approach to game development. Inti-Creates worked on Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10, and are also developing Mighty No. 9.
In response to a question from a fan regarding what order Inti-Creates design levels for their games in, Aizu provided the following answer:
“Usually, in normal development, we usually create the intro stage first and then create the last stage next, and we were taught that that’s how you make good games.
That’s how we’ve been doing it in many situations, but in current days, we’ve been in situations where we’ve been asked to submit a vertical slice. So basically, if we start creating the intro first, we’re not able to show a good vertical slice.
So, what we do is—and this is what we’re doing in this case—we pick one of the normal stages and we create it, and we create it in a way that you could play it over and over again, so people can judge what the game is going to be like. And then we move on to the intro stage, and then create the last stage.
That’s the ideal way of moving, but a lot of times, the designs for the last boss comes in later during development, so sometimes we’re not able to do the ideal case of making the last boss stage after the intro boss stage, because the designs aren’t ready.”
Aizu says that in the case of Mighty No. 9, Inti-Creates are using the Mighty No. 5 stage as the game’s vertical slice stage. Later in the podcast, he reveals that Inti-Creates present Keiji Inafune—who is acting as the project lead—with a playable ROM once a month or more, and take his feedback into account.
Mighty No. 9 is in development for PC, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Wii U and Nintendo 3DS. The game is planned for a Spring 2015 release.
Note: Aizu’s quote slightly edited for grammar and easier reading.
