did yuichiro nozawa program tatsujin ou

[mycophobia]

confirm/deny? thanks

[Steven]

Yes. There was one other programmer as well. I know who it is, but I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say who it was yet.

[mycophobia]

a few years ago i proposed that if it wasnt yuge or uemura then it was probably "the vimana guy" but at the time, and until recently, i thought the vimana guy was lee ohta. but then somebody said it wasn't him and i just left it as a mystery for a while. but recently a friend pointed out yuichiro nozawa was the vimana guy and that he was on a credits list for "Truxton II" on some website. so that's that i suppose, aside from the other guy.

and it made extra sense at the time that the same person who did vimana prolly did tatsujin ou because i had just learned about the response to the loctest version that it was way too easy, and you can indeed trivialize tatsujin ou by tweaking the weapon damage values pretty slightly so that you're just obliterating everything that comes on screen, much like if you play vimana with autofire.

the weirdness of the tick points being time-based, the weirdly locked autofire rate, the presence of an autofire dipswitch, and the sheer paucity of bomb drops might all point to hasty last-minute rebalancing, at the expense of fixing more serious bugs. this is all speculation of course

[Steven]

I don't know that much about the development of Tatsujin Ou, but it was definitely Nozawa + one other programmer + three artists (Ogihara + Kagawa + one other artist, but I don't know who it was) + one sound guy (Yuge). I've seen Nozawa-san at a few events over the past few years but never talked to him, largely because I didn't know it was him until later, but I'd love to talk to him about this game sometime.

That whole thing with the autofire rate is really weird though. Actually, almost everything about this game is weird, but it does make me wonder how the game would be if it was possible to do 30Hz. In theory it should be possible to remove the 15Hz (?) cap with a ROM hack, but...

[mycophobia]

was the other programmer ikeda? come on. you can tell me...

[Steven]

Well, it wasn't IKD lol. I don't know if he was even working at Toaplan yet when this game was released. He might have been, and it's extremely probable that he was working at Toaplan then if he followed the typical Japanese employment cycle of graduate from university on or around March 31 -> begin work on or around April 1, but no, it definitely wasn't IKD.

[mycophobia]

well shoot. i thought that theory had legs tbh.

ah well. thanks for the replies!

[Kino]

More pressingly, which one was the Mahjong Sisters guy? Nozawa, or the mystery programmer? (I thirst for this knowledge)

[Steven]

lol just talking about this game made me want to play it again, so I did, and I got a new high score. Yay, happy.

Now Mahjong Sisters I now very little about and don't know how to play mahjong anyway, but I'm pretty sure that Uemura-san was a programmer on it. Toaplan's game development staff didn't have a lot of guys at that point, so after Get Star some of them made Slap Fight while the rest made Mahjong Sisters. Uemura-san didn't work on Slap Fight, so it's extremely likely that he did Mahjong Sisters. I know he didn't do the music for it, but he probably programmed it. There might have been other programmers on it and I have a feeling there were, but I'm struggling to think of any other programmers that weren't working on Slap Fight at the time. It's possible that there was some overlap between the teams, but I don't know.

[Kino]

Interesting, thanks so much for the insight!

I only ask because I heard that was the one clue they gave about the Tatsujin-Ou programmer, was that he was also on the Mahjong Sisters dev team. The revelation there were actually two programmers complicates things a bit, lol. For now, I'll just lean towards one of the Ohtas being our mystery man.

EDIT: Yep, Steven was right! Just cracked the scoreboard code.

Spoiler

PROGRAM
YNYNYN = Yuichiro Nozawa
TUTUTU = Tatsuya Uemura
PICTURE
AKAKAK = Atsushi Kawaguchi
MUSIC
OOOOOO = Osamu Ohta

So Nozawa's accounted for, but is the programmer they're reluctant to name on this list as well? As hilarious as Uemura would be, I'll have to bet the farm on Ohta. Final answer.

EDIT#2:

Kino, who is really smart and cool, has elsewhere remembered the Gekirindan-Lee Ohta connection that i had long forgotten about and that game has many similar aspects to Tatsujin Ou so im saying Lee Ohta. Mystery solved, right?

With me and you on the case? There was never any doubt.

[mycophobia]

Kino, who is really smart and cool, has elsewhere remembered the Gekirindan-Lee Ohta connection that i had long forgotten about and that game has many similar aspects to Tatsujin Ou so im saying Lee Ohta. Mystery solved, right?

[Steven]

Well... no, it's not Ota Lee lol

I wish I could say more, but eventually we'll run out of programmers, so no more hints from me~

[mycophobia]

Well... no, it's not Ota Lee lol

I wish I could say more, but eventually we'll run out of programmers, so no more hints from me~

but it makes too much sense! why