Inti Creates is currently working on Bloodstained, Azure Striker Gunvolt 2, and Gal*Gun. With a large line-up of games in the works, Operation Rainfall thought it was a good idea to check in with them at E3 2016 to see how they were coming along. We sat down with President CEO Takuya Aizu and Associate Producer and International Affairs Coordinator Matt Papa to answer these questions. For an indepth interview on Inti Creates’ moe-rail shooter Gal*Gun Double Peace you can read our interview conducted at GDC 2016.
I’m sure fans are dying to know how far along Bloodstained is at the moment.
Bloodstained has actually received its first build here at E3 2016 at the Microsoft booth. Up until now, the team working on the game has been working hard on getting that ready for E3. This will provide fans with a first look on how the gameplay for Bloodstained will be.
With Bloodstained and Mighty No. 9 both being Kickstarter games, is Bloodstain‘s progress moving along faster than Mighty No. 9?
When you think about the time frame, Mighty No. 9‘s first playable demo came out in a shorter time than Bloodstained‘s did. The main difference between the titles is Bloodstained is being developed in Unreal Engine 4. Using this engine provided us with higher quality graphics compared to previous Unreal Engines. Also, we were relying on fan input to decide which shaders to use in Bloodstained. This slowed down development because we had to take the data and then input it into the game.
What is Koji Igarashi currently focused on for Bloodstained?
Iga is working really hard on the story. In order to build the other parts of the game you really need to have to story in place. How would you know where enemies are going to go or what bosses go where, and what progression do you encounter these. If you don’t have the story completely put together that’s really kinda hard to discover.
How closely does Iga work with Inti Creates on the development of Bloodstained?
We work very closely with the team at heart play. One of the directors comes in to our office two days a week. This allows both teams to work directly with each other. Our art director who works with Iga and constantly gets his opinions on the art work. The communication between both studios is very quick and very effective.
Recently, Mighty No. 9 had a trailer that some audiences didn’t like; if Inti Creates released a trailer, how would they have done it differently?
Inti Creates has a certain style of trailer that they like to make, and you can see this with Gunvolt. We like to make them clear on what kind of game this is going to be, what kinda of control schemes, and what kind of things can the player do. Also, what kind of weapons do you have and even explain the enemies that you’re fighting. All that crucial information we really like to show off in our trailers.
Is there any updates on the PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS version of the game?
Actually, Inti Creates isn’t working on the handheld versions of Mighty No. 9 so we don’t really have any information that we can give.
Has Gal*Gun Double Peace gone through the ESRB?
We got our rating; Gal*Gun will receive an ‘M for mature’ rating much to the surprise of probably nobody.
Can you talk about some of the differences between Azure Striker Gunvolt 1 and 2?
The biggest difference between Gunvolt 1 and 2 is that in 2 you can play as Copen, who was previously his rival character. Copen has his own story and his play mechanics are completely different. This provides two completely different experiences when going through the game with each character.
Will we ever see Azure Striker Gunvolt on the PlayStation Vita?
I believe there’s a guy who asks this on Twitter once a week. We’re not a super big company. So porting a game to multiple platforms is a lot of work for us. We run into problems when deciding on if we take the time to port this to other platforms, it’ll take that much longer to begin work on other projects. We would have to pull resources from say the sequel in order to work on more versions of the game. We worked hard on the Steam version and that took a lot of time, but we don’t have the numbers to work on multiple projects like that.
Will Azure Striker Gunvolt ever receive an anime?
That would be cool, huh?
Are there any hints to future projects that Inti Creates is working on?
One thing that we can tell you that will never change is, we at Inti Creates love 2D action games. So you can rest assured that we will continue making 2D action games. As for other little hints, we are looking into some VR possibilities.
At Inti Creates, how do developers pitch game ideas to the staff to potentially be worked on?
When we as a company decide that we want to make a new game, we have an inner-company competition. This also all the game creators in our company to come up with game documents for their own ideas. They share these within the company and then we decide which we want to turn work on. For example, that’s how Gal*Gun came up.
Once we decide on a game we want to make, we choose a leader for each team. So you have your graphics team, programming team, planning team, producers, etc. within a game company. We gather a leader from each team so they can express any of their team’s ideas.
Is there anything else you would like to say?
As Inti Creates, we have a lot of games coming this year. We are working hard to get Bloodstained out next year. We really want to hear from people who play our games. We want to know, did you love it? Did you think it was lame? We want to know from our fans what you think of our games; we really appreciate that kind of information.
Inti Creates has been around for 20 years now. And I feel like Inti Creates has been able to accomplish so much this year. This seems to be a really amazing point in time for us right now. We want to show people that this is what Inti Creates is capable of. I really hope people give our games a chance and they enjoy what Inti Creates is all about.
Will you voice your opinions, good and bad to Inti Creates? Less us know in the comments below.
