Benutzer:Subarashii

Interview

Introduction

This interview was conducted on march 3rd 2010, during the course of a press event in Cologne, held by Headup Games, the German publisher of Blazblue: Calamity Trigger. The interview was conducted by Adrian Ruth (Kuroko) and David Huggele (ATG) for www.HardEdge.org, the biggest German Fighting Game community. Before the interview, Tomo Ohno held an introductory speech and outlined Zen United's work in Europe, emphasizing that the late European release of Blazblue: Calamity Trigger is necessary in order to gather feedback about the market, which Arc isn't accustomed to yet.

The interview

HardEdge:

The PC-Version is listed on the internet as coming out in France - so everybody was thinking: oh, it's in french only, will we ever get to play this?

Tomo Ohno:

Our focus of the pc market is actually Germany. This is our target market, since it's obiously the biggest PC market.

HardEdge:

Xbox Live and Playstation Network are very popular platforms. Have you thought of bringing older Arc SystemWorks fighting games to XBOX Live or Playstation Network?

Tomo Ohno:

There is a possibility but at the moment we don´t have actual plans. What the thing is: for example in Guilty Gear. It was developed for PS2. It looks ok but but back then the TVs weren´t that big. There were those big, chunky TVs. It looks ok. Play Guilty Gear now on those flat TVs, the big ones - It doesn't look good. It looks as if you are missing some color. It looks kind of grey. So that was one concern we had. We want people to play it.

HardEdge:

Of course, everybody is expecting you to make another HD game.

Tomo Ohno:

So it's one thing that we don´t want to release something where the quality is not as great as we expect it to be. We can't ask people to use an old TV to play. Another reason is of technical nature. Since Guilty Gear is a 2D game, it's rather more difficult to do than it would be in a 3D game. The difference is: you have a lot of memory because of data right? When you play, and it says "loading" - it takes all your memory to the cache. In 3D games, the models are loaded, and the only thing that has to be sent are their positions. The data is not that big. With 2D, you have to load every single drawing to play, for one player you need to upload around 200 drawings so for example Noel vs Ragna you have to upload around 400 drawings which is a massive amount that cannot be cut down.

This is a very interesting drawing. As you can see this is just regular printer paper. On some of them - there is actually a print on the back. You know, they used misprints to work with (laughs). This is an original drawing that the main artist did. Then she hands it to the assistant artist, and he creates the animation. For example, this is litchi: This is hier animation for jump spin and land (shows us sketches of her j.B), for that you need 15 drawings. A B C and so on.

That's what I was talking about before: exaggerated movement. Look at her leg, it's so long. if you leave it in its normal size for this animation - it doesnt work. With 3D, the current technology doesn´t allow you to do this. For example to make her spin, you need 15 drawings. If you think of the amount of overall data, it's a massive amount of the data.