One of my favourite events each year is BitSummit - an annual indie games festival in Kyoto. It’s a great show, where up and coming devs mingle with industry icons, and where there’s no shortage of great games to play.
Last year, Koji Igarashi – one of the godfathers of the Igavania/Metroidvania genre – was actually manning a booth, showing off the latest build of his Kickstarter success story Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. This year, the game wasn’t there to play, but Igarashi himself was still in attendance. I caught up with him to get a broad sense for how development is progressing. After all, since BitSummit last year, Bloodstained has been delayed into 2018, the game has found a publisher and new technology has been implemented, along with new studios getting involved.
IGN: How is the 505 Games partnership going? How has it changed things for you?
Koji Igarashi: It’s a very developer-friendly company, so it’s easy to work with them, and right now we’re in talks about how to prepare for E3 – what we want to present there. It’s going well.
IGN: You’re hoping to make a big splash at E3 this year?
Koji Igarashi: As you may know, North America is the biggest fan-base for the Kickstarter, so it’s very important for us to have a good presentation at E3, because that’s where we feel that our core audience is.
IGN: Broadly speaking, how is development progressing? How far has Bloodstained come since BitSummit last year?
Koji Igarashi: We decided to make some changes to the way the visuals worked. You’re probably already aware, but we’ve implemented procedural generation to our backgrounds. It’s an investment now, but going forward we won’t have to create the stages by hand, we can sort of make fine adjustments later on quite easily.
IGN: Yes, I was quite surprised to hear that the procedural generation was to make the world feel more lived in. It’s quite a cool implementation of that kind of technology.
Koji Igarashi: The idea was that it’s boring to have the same asset repeated over and over in a level, so by adding these flaws to them or having procedurally generated levels of deterioration on these items, they’re the same asset but they all look different, so it makes the world feel more believable, or more real.
IGN: How closely are you working with Inti Creates now? And can you tell me about the new studio you brought on-board to assist with development? [As mentioned late last year.]
Koji Igarashi: We’re working with Inti Creates the same way we have been all along. They provide a support channel for us. Dico is the [new] company we’re working with, along with Monobit, who is helping Dico. They’re adding new technology, new development approaches to the game, like the procedural generation and stuff like that. That’s what we’ve called them in to do. They’re pretty separate [though], they have separate roles – Inti and Dico.
IGN: There’s a lot of moving parts now. How different has the reality of independent development been from your expectation?
If you think about working at a larger company, then you kind of have the resources in-house to do what you want to do, but if you’re a smaller company then you have to collaborate...
Koji Igarashi: Just talking about this change in particular, we realised that we couldn’t finish everything that we wanted to do in time if we didn’t change our technology, so even though it’s complicated, it’s just something that had to happen in order for us to produce the content that we want to for the game. If you think about working at a larger company, then you kind of have the resources in-house to do what you want to do, but if you’re a smaller company then you have to collaborate – you don’t have all the strengths yourself, so you have to work with other companies that complement your strengths. So that’s probably a difference in feeling to the way work was before – the resources are a collaboration between companies.
IGN: Do you think 2D gameplay is the ultimate way to present an Igavania-style game, or would you ever consider trying to do another 3D game in this style in the future?
Koji Igarashi: I don’t really have a strong opinion for 2D or 3D for an Igavania game – either would probably be fine, but I don’t have much experience with 3D games, so first of all, that’s not my strong suit, so I’m just working with what I know, and two, the Kickstarter fans and backers probably wanted a 2D Igavania game, so that’s what we’re making now because that’s what the fans wanted. If, in the future, it’s possible to make a 3D game then that’s something I’d be interested in exploring.
Cam Shea is senior editor in IGN's Sydney office and tries to spend as much time as possible in Japan. He's also starting to enjoy Twitter.
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