DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

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blackoak
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DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by blackoak »

Here is that SDOJ interview from Arcadia that Aleksei was requesting... starting a new thread just for visibility. Its short and there's no big revelations, but its nice to hear their thoughts on how SDOJ fits into the Dodonpachi series. I'm really looking forward to playing this again in May! Disappointed I didn't see the word "stoic" anywhere though... ;) Next thing on my translation to-do list, other than getting my site up to archive all this stuff, is the Dragon Spirit interview from the new Shooting Gameside volume.


My previous shmupforum translations can be found at this thread, but I will also list them below for convenience:

Takahashi Meijin Interview - Shooting Gameside #1
SDOJ and Cave STG Collection Interview - Famitsu 2/8/2013
Gunbird manga scanlation
Jamestown and Sine Mora - Shooting Gameside Interviews
Mahou Daisakusen manga translation
Toaplan Shooting Chronicle Interview Madness
R-Type Developer Interview Collection
Gradius Developer Interviews (I,II,III,IV,Gaiden)
Scorer Interview Collection - TAC, LAOS, NAL, MON, etc
Stella Vanity and Valhellio Developer Interviews
Four M-KAI Interviews (Eschatos, JSS, Cardinal Sins)
Yoshinori Satake - Steel Empire, Over Horizon Interview
Armed Police Batrider Characters/Stages/Bosses translation (w/ NTSC-J)
Basiscape Composers Interview - Shooting Gameside #1
Cave Shooting History Interview Extravaganza!
Doujin Round Table Discussion - Shooting Gameside #1
Mushi HD/Saidaioujou Famitsu Cave Interview
Raizing Interview - Sotoyama Yuuichi and Yokoo Kenichi
Masahiro Yuge - Toaplan interview (Shooting Gameside vol. 4)
Tatsuya Uemura - Toaplan interview (Shooting Gameside vol.4)


Dodonpachi Saidaioujou Developer Interview
Interview by Arcadia, 6/2012

Ikeda (IKD) - The man responsible for bringing Cave STG to the world.
After getting the SDOJ project off the ground, he mainly worked as a producer on it.
His favorite ship, throughout the whole DDP series, is the Type A.

Koizumi Daisuke - Worked on Akai Katana and Dodonpachi Maximum.
For SDOJ, he was in charge of the game system and balancing the difficulty.
His favorite ship during test plays was the Type C.

—Could you tell us first the details of how the SDOJ development got started?

Ikeda: Since DOJ we've been saying "this is the last one," but certain circumstances intervened and here we are... (laughs) Releasing a new arcade game in the arcade market today is, to be frank, extremely difficult. So we felt that, given the market today, if we were going to take a shot at it then the Donpachi series was the only logical choice. We started the project quite awhile ago, around March of last year. With some of our previous games, like Akai Katana and Deathsmiles II, the development period was very short and we didn't have a lot of extra time to balance or fine-tune them. We received complaints from some of the players too... "what happened here?" This time we had the Donpachi brand to consider, so we asked management for more time for development.

—Koizumi, when did you join the SDOJ development?

Koizumi: I joined in December. Before that I had been working on Dodonpachi Maximum, and when that ended I joined the SDOJ team. This was my first time working on an arcade Donpachi game.

—Did you feel a lot of pressure then?

Koizumi: Yeah. Daifukkatsu was built around a unique bullet cancelling system, but this time Ikeda told us he wanted to make a game where you could experience the simple joy of shooting and dodging. I remember really struggling with how to make it "simple but interesting."

—Was that idea to simplify the gameplay something you had in mind from the outset?

Ikeda: Regarding bullet cancelling, we decided to not do anything too extreme this time. We wanted the game to be as simple as possible, with all the strategy revolving around simple dodging and shooting. We started planning things along those lines, but for a long time we just couldn't get anywhere, or tie things up into a solid system. Then Koizumi finished working on DDP Maximum and joined us. All I told him was our basic ideas and asked him to create a system around it... come to think of it, it was a pretty horrible way to pass the baton. (laughs)

—And that's where the idea to continue in the footsteps of DOJ came from?

Koizumi: Our concept for the game was "Daioujou for 2012." Of all Cave's games, many people have played DOJ, and I think its a title we're somewhat known for. I wanted to take the strengths of that game and update it for the playstyle of today's world... I mean things like making the status of the rank and such, which you couldn't see before, transparent to the player. In that sense I think its an evolution of the simple Donpachi gameplay.

—SDOJ also prominently features the human characters... was this something you planned from the outset?

Ikeda: Our idea for the presentation this time was "let's make it as straightforward as possible!" At Cave, you see, we have a habit of making things a little weird... "straight is boring." (laughs) But for SDOJ we decided to make it as straightforward and simple as possible. I think we all felt that if this was going to be our final game at Cave, we wanted to do something straightforward and badass like that. On that note we invited the voice actors into the team and endeavored to make the characters accessible too. Still, our character designer Nagi Ryou grumbled that "Cave's ideas are anything but simple!" (laughs)

—How did the players and arcade operators respond to the location tests?

Ikeda: Honestly, it was a really positive response and we were very relieved. For me personally, I can sum it up in one word: happiness. When I saw all the excited people at the location test, I felt once again that "ahh, arcades are great!" (laugh) I don't mean to naysay the online experience, but I think when people gather in-person around an arcade screen like that its the best. Actually, we had a lot of resistance during the creation of SDOJ. There was criticism during the earlier in-company testing phase as well. I was very anxious about the location test, wondering what we would do if the public didn't like it. So when the response turned out to be favorable, I was really happy.

—After SDOJ was released, we heard people complain that the later stages were too hard. Was this spike in difficulty something you planned?

Ikeda: I'll let Koizumi speak to the details here, but for my part, I can say that for DOJ, I told our developers to make it challenging. With Daifukkatsu the player could alter the system, and it was more accessible in that regard. But for SDOJ I wanted it to be a real challenge, something that would give players a lot of replay value. So its true that I told Koizumi to err on the side of making it more difficult. (laughs)

Koizumi: The difficulty of our recent games has been set very high, but I think the hypers are easier to refill in SDOJ compared with DOJ, and you also have the auto-bomb option, so although its difficult, we tried to make it a game that you could progressively improve at, bit by bit. Hypers come about twice as fast, so the pace of the game should feel faster. And its quite common to die and come back with a hyper, so we aimed for a balance that would make the player feel "if I had done just a little better in that spot, I could have made it!"

—Regarding the customary hidden boss Hibachi, what was the idea behind adding her to SDOJ?

Ikeda: Well, at this point in the series its pretty much a given that we have to add Hibachi. (laughs)

Koizumi: But we did fret a lot over whether to add Hibachi for Shot, Laser, or Expert mode.

Ikeda: There were many heated discussions about that.

Koizumi: Some people said Hibachi should only appear in Expert mode, but in the end we felt that allowing players to face the TLB in any mode would prevent players from feeling like the Shot or Laser modes were in some way inferior, and would encourage people to play in each mode to the end.

—It seems like Hibachi's patterns are all very familiar variations on the previous Dodonpachi series' TLBs?

Koizumi: We based her attacks on previous patterns from the DDP series, so it will doubtlessly appear that way to certain players. Though I think players who see her for the first time and hang out at the bottom of the screen will be surprised when they get killed. (laughs) Then there's the final hakkyou pattern. That's an homage to Dodonpachi, but with the fugusashi bullets going in each direction and the ability to use your hyper laser, I think it will be a new experience for players.

[[tr note: fugusashi bullets look like this, and are called such because they resemble a prepared plate of fugu (blowfish). A "hakkyou" pattern is a term for a bullet pattern that a boss puts out when its "going crazy", usually triggered by destroying certain parts of the boss (like in DOJ and SDOJ stage 1 bosses) or timing out the easier patterns.]]

—Well, that's all the time we have today, but please give a final message to our readers and your fans.

Koizumi: Following in the footsteps of the Dodonpachi brand, I think Saidaioujou, as the name suggests, will prove to be game you can play for a long time to come: please enjoy the ultimate "peaceful death"! [[tr note: this is a silly play on words regarding the Saidaioujou title]]

Ikeda: There have been trials and tribulations with this project from day one, but seeing as this was our chance to develop an arcade shooting game again, almost our entire development team worked together on it. And thanks to that collective goodwill we were able to bring SDOJ into the world. Koizumi really worked hard in fine-tuning the game, and because of his efforts I think we have a worthy game that will live up to the Dodonpachi series' legacy. With SDOJ we tried to make a game that returns to the basics of the pure joys of STG, and my hope is that it will provide a truly lengthy and fulfilling experience for players.
Last edited by blackoak on Thu Dec 12, 2013 11:57 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by emphatic »

Thanks a lot, you amazing man! :D
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by Muchi Muchi Spork »

Kind of depressing but thanks for translating it.
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by iconoclast »

Thanks. I hope Koizumi gets to work on more shumps, he's get a stellar track record so far.
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by Special World »

Muchi Muchi Spork wrote:Kind of depressing but thanks for translating it.
Depressing interviews are Cave's forte. If this is how they go out though, I think this is the best possible way (barring a third Mushi game): going back to the start of the series and sticking with the core gameplay that made the series great. I would have been pretty sad if DFK was the last Dodonpachi we ever got from Cave. That game really doesn't feel like Dodonpachi to me at all.
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by Skykid »

I think we all felt that if this was going to be our final game at Cave, we wanted to do something straightforward and badass like that.
The writing's on the wall.
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by brentsg »

Skykid wrote:
I think we all felt that if this was going to be our final game at Cave, we wanted to do something straightforward and badass like that.
The writing's on the wall.
Hopefully EA will buy them and we'll get shmups as paid DLC buried in Mushi and DDP FPS games.
Breaking news: Dodonpachi Developer Cave Releases Hello Kitty Game
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by Skykid »

brentsg wrote:
Skykid wrote:
I think we all felt that if this was going to be our final game at Cave, we wanted to do something straightforward and badass like that.
The writing's on the wall.
Hopefully EA will buy them and we'll get shmups as paid DLC buried in Mushi and DDP FPS games.
With microtransactions: pay for ammunition, buy laser attachments, $15 per bomb.
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by AntiFritz »

Skykid wrote:
brentsg wrote:
Hopefully EA will buy them and we'll get shmups as paid DLC buried in Mushi and DDP FPS games.
With microtransactions: pay for ammunition, buy laser attachments, $15 per bomb.
Why stop their, pay to chain.
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by brentsg »

DFK Blue Label with paid bullet canceling...
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by matrigs »

brentsg wrote:DFK Blue Label with paid bullet canceling...
insert coin for bullet cancel.

shmup of the year.
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by Udderdude »

At least their last shmup was a good attempt at going back to basics. Now if only that scoring bug wasn't there D:
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by DJ Incompetent »

Skykid wrote:
I think we all felt that if this was going to be our final game at Cave, we wanted to do something straightforward and badass like that.
The writing's on the wall.
"Since DOJ we've been saying "this is the last one,""

with many other writings
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by Udderdude »

DJ Incompetent wrote:
Skykid wrote:
I think we all felt that if this was going to be our final game at Cave, we wanted to do something straightforward and badass like that.
The writing's on the wall.
"Since DOJ we've been saying "this is the last one,""

with many other writings
I'd rather they go out on a high note, to be honest.
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by KAI »

Koizumi: Our concept for the game was "Daioujou for 2012."
I would like to see a "Garegga for 2013".

Awesome job blackoak.
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by z0mbie90 »

If CAVE is going to do more arcade games I wanna see Guwange 2 or a new Dangun Feveron style stg.
Nice work as always blackoak :P
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by DragonInstall »

Another Espgaluda please
Espgaluda III needs to happen.
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by rtw »

Thank you once again for the translation blackoak!
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by MintyTheCat »

Many thanks for the Translation, Blackoak.
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by sven666 »

great job as always blackoak! :)

shame the interview is so hollow, in true cave fashion it doesnt say much about anything really.. ?
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by n0rtygames »

Just caught this thread. Thanks for putting this together Blackoak. Great job :)
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Re: DDP:SDOJ Developer Interview - Arcadia 06/12

Post by slateman »

Awesome translation - Thanks!

With less time than ever to play games, let alone shmups; I enjoyed DFK though it pales in comparison to DOJ. I'm glad to have gotten a DFK port. It's cool to hear how things progressed after that "last" game.
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