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Shin Kamaitachi no Yoru: Developer Interview

How was Shin Kamaitachi no Yoru: The Eleventh Suspect made? We spoke to the development producer, Kojiro Nakashima, the director, Yoriki Daigo, and the scenario director, Koichiro Ito.

Development producer
Kojiro Nakashima

In charge of overall progress management, production and more. Notable works include the Kamaitachi no Yoru and Mystery Dungeon series (as composer) and Imabikiso (director).

Director
Yoriki Daigo

In charge of both the overall system design, and the planning/tuning of Minna de Kamaitachi. Notable works include Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer 5 (director).

Scenario director
Koichiro Ito

In charge of bringing together each of the scenarios and game-ifying them. Notable works include Trick x Logic (scenario director) and Zombie Daisuki (producer).

■How Shin Kamaitachi no Yoru came to be

―Please tell us how this title ended up getting made.

Nakashima: After work had finished on the last game, Kamaitachi no Yoru x3: The Truth Behind the Mikazuki Island Incident※1 (below, x3), we were always thinking about the next game. It was just over a year ago that the project actually got off the ground, but a bunch of different pitches have come and gone over the last three or four years.

―Had you decided to use a brand new cast from the start?

Nakashima: The last game served as sort of a finale for the Kamaitachi no Yoru series up until that point, so I felt like we had to distance ourselves from it. We toyed with all sorts of different ideas for a while, but it wasn't until I'd asked Kuroda※2 to write the scenario that I was ultimately like, okay, let's do this.

Daigo: The three of us here had talked about wanting to keep making Kamaitachi no Yoru games far into the future, and since in the past we'd asked Kuroda to work on the novelisation of Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors※3 and the scenario for Trick x Logic※4 for us, we went to Abiko※5 and asked him what his opinion on Kuroda was. He gave his seal of approval, so we decided to move ahead and officially ask him to write the Mystery Chapter that serves as the game's main scenario.

Ito: After that, he'd give us a selection of plots that we'd consider, something we repeated a few times, before eventually he came up with a really interesting idea that was very reminiscent of the first Kamaitachi no Yoru. We thought that new and old customers alike would enjoy it, so we began with the development of the Mystery Chapter, the main scenario.

―Just like the first game, this game is set in a pension on a snowy mountain. Was that his suggestion, too?

Ito: The idea for that didn't exist at all at the start - it was set in a totally different place. But Nakamura※6 said to us, "When you think of Kamaitachi no Yoru, you think of snow falling and trapping you inside, right?" So ultimately, in accordance with his wishes, we set it on a snowy mountain.

Nakashima: That would've been about last summer or autumn. We still hadn't decided to release it on PS Vita and PS3 at that point. Later, we heard that the PS Vita was going to come out, so, deciding to hurry and release it in time for that, we immediately got a team together and spent a year working very hard to get it done. Since we were releasing alongside the PS Vita, despite the game being a "return to its roots", we wondered whether there was anything fun we could add in. Daigo racked his brain trying to come up with something - or was going through a process of trial and error, I guess. That ended up turning into Minna de Kamaitachi and Futari de Kamaitachi.

―Was Futari de Kamaitachi originally made specifically for the PS Vita?

Daigo: We chose something aimed at the Vita out of loads of ideas. There's a bit in Futari de Kamaitachi where you have to tap six holes on the screen to cover them, for example, but doing something like that on the PS3 would be really tricky. That's why we decided to make it Vita exclusive. We made it with the intention of having a man and a woman play it together, imagining a scene where their fingers naturally brush together when tapping the rear touchpad... or something like that.

■Kamaitachi no Yoru returns to its roots

―Did the game's theme of "returning to its roots" come as a request from Nakamura?

Nakashima: That was part of it. He was the one who came up with the idea to set it in a pension on a snowy mountain, but initially, we came up with ideas for all different styles of Kamaitachi no Yoru games. For example, we thought of a style where the characters aren't "blue people", a style where we'd include a bunch more gimmicks... There was a lot of trial and error going on. The reason the theme ended up becoming "a return to our roots" was because the first game in the series was the most popular and best supported one. I actually heard here and there from people that they enjoyed playing it, which made me want to make another game with that same air of suspense and intellectual thrill for players to experience. I felt like the tension of people in a closed circle※7 being killed off one by one was the sort of mystery story people were looking for. It's not only a return to the game's roots in the form of the setting, but also in terms of going back to the origin of what makes for an enjoyable story. In that case, keeping the characters as "blue people" like they had been up until that point seemed most fitting. We actually made a few dozen different variants of the blue people during development. We chose the type that fitted the atmosphere best and looked best, but still looked a bit more fresh and new.

―As the game is set in the same situation as the first game - a pension on a snowy mountain - I'd expect that makes it easy for people to end up drawing comparisons between the two. Did you feel like that put pressure on you?

Nakashima: For me, personally, I feel like while the first game was a masterpiece, the trick used in this game's scenario is at least as good as the original, if not better. I'm not stressed out by it - if anything, I'm confident in that.

Ito: Kuroda has said this himself, but I think that it's similar to but different from the first game. It follows the same pattern of going to a pension on a snowy mountain where normality turns into something extraordinary and people get killed off, but we've added a lot of new staging and presentation techniques. The first game was really well made, but while I wanted to uphold respect for that, I didn't want it to end up just being an imitation. I did some calculations recently, and in terms of the amount of content, for example, the Mystery Chapter alone is about as long as the entirety of the original Kamaitachi no Yoru. It's a pretty big upgrade in that regard. By the way, overall it's about 2.5 times bigger. There's about 1.5 times more content even than in 428※8, too.

■A scenario carefully chosen from a vast selection of plots

―How did you choose the writers and list of scenarios?

Ito: The writers mostly came as referrals from Abiko and Kuroda. This time around, we thought it'd be a good idea to have a wide variety of scenarios, so we decided the general gist of each story's content based on the writer in question's favoured genre.

Did you simply ask for a rough genre like "horror" or "spy" and leave the rest up to them?

Ito: Yes. We took each writer's personality into consideration when we made our requests, like this person is good at entertainment, this person is good at jokes and humour, and so on. Basically, a level of variety in the scenarios was established when we were choosing writers.

Nakashima: Kuroda's Mystery Chapter was finished first, so we showed it to each of the authors and made requests like, "Could you please flesh this character out in this spot?" Then they'd submit the plot, and we'd work out the details from there.

―Was it easy for you to decide on the content of each scenario?

Ito: We and the writers had plenty of disputes over things, of course (laughs). Since there's a subtle difference between what makes for a good book and what makes for a good game, even though it's within the sound novel genre, you can't always just copy a novel one-to-one. For example, there are some cases where books have unsatisfying endings, and that can be fine for that as a story. When it comes to a game where the player puts themselves in the shoes of the main character, they of course want to feel a sense of accomplishment when they beat it. We asked each writer to really bear that difference in mind.

―I'm sure you received a lot of plots from the writers. What was your standard for deciding what to use and what to reject?

Nakashima: We generally placed the most importance on how enjoyable it was, whilst trying to maintain a wide variety overall, so we started by taking out anything too similar to the others. To be bluntly honest, there were also times where we were forced to turn something down because it would be too expensive for us to make.

Ito: There were lots of plots we didn't choose for the Mystery Chapter, too. This is exactly the same style we've had when developing all of the sound novel games we've released so far. An absolute mountain of stuff gets rejected. I think the only game that miraculously didn't get turned down at the plot stage was Trick x Logic.

―Roughly how long does it take to complete work on a single scenario?

Ito: It took about four months to finish the longest scenario. Around two for the shortest.

Nakashima: Which one took four months...?

Ito: Uh, Abiko's (laughs). The rest took about three months each.

―As of right now, it's been decided that four downloadable scenarios※9 will be released. Do you have any plans to add more DLC in the future?

Daigo: Nothing planned for the time being, no.

■A cast full of personality

―Who decided the details of the characters?

Daigo: They were based off of Kuroda's Mystery Chapter, which our designer took and ran with, like, "I guess this is how this character would dress."

―Was Kuroda the one who generally came up with things like the main character being an aspiring novelist, or Omori being an otaku?

Ito: Yes. Those sorts of things were all in his scenario from the beginning. With that as a base, our graphics team and an outside company worked together to flesh them out.

Daigo: By the way, Poporin is an unusual case where the writers and I kept adding more and more to her in each of our own scenarios, until at some point she ended up becoming established as a character in her own right (laughs).

Ito: Poporin was originally just something that got briefly touched on in Kuroda's scenario, but Daigo and the other writers kept expanding on it. Ultimately, she ended up getting her own original story※10 (laughs).

Daigo: Seeing the other writers excitedly writing made me want to try writing a story for Poporin. That's how I ended up writing the Poporin chapter.

―It's fun how you can connect the dots across the Mystery Chapter and other scenarios. Like, "Oh, so this is Grand Chief Panparapippi."

Ito: Daigo and I were responsible for that. A group of authors had hardly ever come together to write something like this before, so we were careful to make sure everything lined up. While naturally the cast is the same across each story, some side scenarios are fun in part because they tie together even minor character details, so we adjusted that across the board.

■The first voiced game in the series

―In this game, a first for the series, the characters have been voice acted. What led you to decide to make this addition?

Nakashima: We've used voice acting before, for example on 428 and Imabikiso※11, and from my experiences with that, I felt like having key scenes voiced makes them feel as if they have more presence and realism, and can make you feel emotions more strongly. It was a test as well, though, since Kamaitachi no Yoru has never had voices before.

―Was there anyone on the team who was against it, and thought you'd be better off not having voices?

Nakashima: Daigo was, at first (laughs). He was of the opinion that since sound novels are novels, it'd be better to do things via text rather than speech. When you hear someone talk, you can't help but let it colour your perception of them. He was worried that it might negatively impact the players' own imaginations.

Daigo: I was worried that it might end up too much like an anime rather than a sound novel, so at first I was fairly reluctant. In the end, when I saw the finished product I didn't feel like it hurt the tempo at all, and the voice actors were all really talented, so it didn't feel very anime-like at all. If anything, the way they talk made me feel like I was watching a dubbed film, so it was enjoyable to listen to. In hindsight, I'm glad it's voiced.

Ito: My impression was that the atmosphere of each scene and place was expressed through the voice acting. They managed to directly convey the air at that moment through conversation in a way that you couldn't fully manage through text alone. In a way, they're utilised almost like the game's sound. When voices are playing during the game, we lower or mute the BGM, but I think having voices instead of BGM creates a sense of atmosphere itself.

―Why did you not have the entire game voiced?

Ito: At one point, we did plan on doing that, but it would've affixed too strong of a personality and image to the characters. We went with only having part of the game voiced to achieve our goal of stimulating people's own imaginations and impressions of what they're like.

Daigo: As a general rule, we made sure to have each character speak as soon as they're introduced. Otherwise, you might hear their voice after spending a while looking at them and be like, "That's not how I thought Omori would sound!" We were conscious of that sort of thing while working on the game.

―Did you struggle with anything in terms of the staging?

Daigo: The biggest difference between this game and past entries is that it uses 3D models. You can move the camera around in real time, which makes it possible to do things like rotate your viewpoint at will. We had quite a lot of difficulties related to that.

Nakashima: That ended up giving us a wider scope to work with when it came to effects. If you think of 428, for example, that was done using live action, so you've just got this one fixed image that you can't really play around with much. With 3D, on the other hand, you can show the scene from a variety of different angles. Because of that, we had to take a lot of different things into account. Which angle would make this scene most effective? Which angle would be best to create a sense of fear? That kind of thing.

■About Minna de Kamaitachi

―Since Minna de Kamaitachi is online, I'm guessing it must've been quite a struggle to tune?

Daigo: The thing I took into consideration the most was the fact that I don't actually play many online games myself (laughs). My goal was to make an online game that even people who don't play online games could play, but it ended up getting to the point where there was no meaning in having it be online at all. That was no good at all, so, since I used to be a programmer, I wrote a simple script and had my colleagues playtest it over and over. They told me things like what did and didn't work, and I gradually adjusted it over time until it ended up in its current form.

―Is there any aspect of Minna de Kamaitachi that you want the players to pay particular attention to?

Daigo: My goal was to preserve the concept of an online game that stayed faithful to the spirit of Kamaitachi no Yoru. That spirit in my mind is the story, so the details of the game are are filled out in a log in the format of a story, an element which I made very sure was nice and polished. It's not like you just play the game and then okay, it's done - everything you've done is recorded in the style of a novel. I thought the concept of being able to make your own detective story would be the sort of thing that fans of Kamaitachi no Yoru would enjoy.

Nakashima: Maybe there are some people who ignore the Minna de Kamaitachi log and don't look at it much, but there's a surprising amount of playfulness in there, like appearances from the previous protagonist Toru and Minorikawa from 428, so please be sure to give it a look.

Daigo: Also, we initially ordered about 40 avatars※12 from the designers, but they came back with 120 of them that's basically a Chunsoft all-stars line-up, so please check that out too. Most of the characters from our past games have one, so please do try collecting them all. By the way, Monokuma※13 from Spike's Danganronpa is in there as an avatar, too.

■Stories that can be talked about now

―Aside from that, are there any behind-the-scenes stories you can reveal now that the game is done?

Daigo: Yes. There's an image of Akagi's body floating in the bath in the Mystery Chapter. She's actually played by Ito's wife there.

―What, seriously!?

Daigo: Initially, we were going to do that scene with the "blue people", but it just wasn't scary at all, so we decided to do it with live action instead. We were trying to figure out how we should handle that, when it turned out that Ito's wife used to be an actress, so we asked her to do it. We had her wear a red jacket, and we went and bought a pool from Don Quijote that we set up by the office, and since she's supposed to be in a white hot spring, we filled it with bath salts to make it all fizzy and then had her get in and float in the water.

Ito: The bath salts we used cost about 1000 yen, but instead of putting in around a capful like you're supposed to, we poured loads in and the whole thing turned pure white (laughs). It would've been better if it was cloudier and more translucent-looking instead, honestly. All of the staff members were in high spirits and weirdly excited at the time. Also, in terms of the scenario, normally we ask the author to keep the volume to about 50 sheets of manuscript paper, but there were times when, for example, the finished article would end up being around three or four times that amount. Stuff like the Bingo Chapter, though. Who told them to write so much (laughs)? It was kind of funny, though.

Daigo: But it was so good that we couldn't bring ourselves to cut it. We were basically kind of like, "Well, let's go for it, I guess?" (laughs)

Ito: Right. That did sometimes mean scrapping scenarios we'd initially intended on using, though.

―Finally, please give us your messages for the fans, or tell them why they should play the game.

Ito: This time around, we've brought in a fresh cast of new faces, creating new characters in place of fixtures like Toru and Mari, and I hope to develop them further from here, so please tell us what you think! I hope to develop the new characters of Kaito and Kyoka alongside you all.

Daigo: There's a variety of different things in the game to enjoy. Aside from Minna de Kamaitachi, our brand new attempt at doing something over a network, there's also all sorts of foreshadowing. I hope you'll reread it a few times and enjoy.

Nakashima: Since we're returning to the game's "roots" I think people who liked prior games in the Kamaitachi no Yoru series will find it fun enough to hold its own against the first game. I really hope everyone gives us their thoughts and opinions on it and we can take those into the next game.

―Do the players' opinions have a pretty significant impact on your decisions?

Nakashima: Absolutely! So, whether it's through the questionnaire on the official site, the official Chunsoft Twitter page or wherever, please feel free to give us your thoughts.

●Conducted in November 2011 at Chunsoft