It wasn’t made to be unreasonable, instead it is an opportunity. So to counter, you can Guard Break in God Hand. However, I feel that if we would have let the player block too, we probably would have ended up with a monotonous game.
When we made God Hand, only the enemies could block, and I often hear that this was unreasonable. Even when you think that a pattern is fun, there is probably something else to it that is making you feel like you are having a good time, don’t you think? If I am making an enemy, I want people to enjoy what I am creating, so I try my best to avoid patterns.įurthermore, if a player can block, it becomes a hot-bed for patterns or for the kind of passive gameplay that I am not a fan of. Making things pattern-based does allow players to create strategies easily, but I think it ends up feeling more like work than fun. I may be an old man, but I’m a pretty hardcore gamer, so I think I’m pretty good at reacting to things. Nor will I ever let an enemy do some sort of attack that can’t be dodged even though the player is reacting to it. When I make an enemy, I treat it as an extension of myself, so if I feel that I myself couldn’t react and dodge in a certain amount of time, I am not going to allow an enemy to do that either. I tend to get cold towards things that make me feel like I am fighting against a computer.
The player has done nothing ahead of time to warrant it, so I do often wonder what in the hell the enemy is reacting to that he is dodging all of a sudden. If you are able to get things up and running early, you are able to conduct even more experiments, which are directly linked to increasing the quality of the work.ģ) Don’t Make Enemies That Behave Irrationallyįor instance, I absolutely hate enemies that automatically evade or counter at the exact moment the player hits the attack button.
One may think that because one hasn’t thought things out entirely before starting that there would be quite a bit of trial and error however, as the fundamental game design is prone to change, I need to be able to react quickly to these changes. If you are able to get things moving on-screen at an early stage, you can figure out if you are off-course and get back on track without much damage. Making enemies is frequently about trial and error. Especially with Kamiya-san, who tends to not be someone who is very specific from the get-go, opting instead to just shoot ideas at you on the fly, you have to be ready to adapt and adjust at all times. (Other than setting a direction to work from in the beginning.) So I don’t really ask or depend on a design doc, and instead I talk with those involved to get a good idea of what needs to be done, and then I take over on my own and make the enemy my way. When making enemies, one would think that you need a design doc, but in reality, there ends up being so many changes in the end that it doesn’t really make a difference. Since I’ve been in charge of enemies for something like 10 years now, there are a few things that I pay particular attention to when creating enemies, and I’d like to share them with you. And of course, I was in charge of Bayonetta herself. With Bayonetta, I handed off a couple of the enemies to some new programmers here, and thus I wasn’t in charge of everything, but I did take care of 95% of things.
On God Hand, I was also placed in charge of programming the player as well as all the enemies in the game. On Devil May Cry, I was in charge of maybe 1/3 of the enemies however, on Resident Evil 4, I was in charge of them all. I guess I chewed through things too fast, but every time I would be placed on a new team, the number of enemies I was in charge of kept growing. I don’t know if it was because they liked me just making things on my own, but after that, I kept getting asked to program the enemies. I remember adding things simply because I had a few extra moments – I would change up the grunt enemies, give them new traits, or increase the number of their variations, or I’d increase the variety of swords that would fly around our “rival character.” However, making an original game was incredibly fun, and I remember making lots of things just because.
It was also my first time working on a completely original game, so I guess I didn’t really have a grasp on how to make enemies back then. Back then, I had no understanding of 3D, so I remember drilling myself in the basics of three dimensions. Our previous collaboration was on Devil May Cry, where I was first put in charge of player/enemy programming.
On Bayonetta, I was mainly in charge of the player and enemy character interactions.īayonetta was the first project in a while where I once again teamed up with Kamiya-san. I’m Don-san, otherwise known as a third-rate programmer.