Hello,
How have you all been? I hope you’re enjoying your weekend.
I am Hifumi Nara, producer at “Production Exabilities”.
Monday is the “Day of the Sea” in Japan, and will be a public holiday.
The long rainy season is about to end, and we will be welcoming the Summer.
I like the scenery and the air of freedom during Summer, but living in Tokyo,
you can’t survive the Summer without air-conditioning.
So I’m not exactly fond of my electricity bills during the Summer.
Having said that, ice cream, fresh vegetables and fruits are some of the things
I look forward to.
Well then, let me get to the main part of this newsletter.
Today’s I’ll be talking about “Wing of Darkness”.
The very game we are working on right now!
I’ll talk about how the game came to be, and the key concepts behind the game.
Of course, if we were to go through everything, it’ll turn into an essay.
So for this newsletter, we’ll be touching on the main points.
Just the two of us
As we mentioned in the previous newsletter,
our studio currently consists of 10 members.
But when the project first started, it was just 2 people:
The director, Hitotsuyanagi, and myself.
We grew up as childhood friends in the countryside,
and have known each other for 15+ years.
It’s actually not the first time we tried to make a game together.
Around 10 years ago, we tried to make our own game, but due to a lot of obstacles,
we had to drop that project. In the future,
I’d like to talk about that episode in more detail.
Fast forward to 3 years ago,
Hitotsuyanagi was working on the forefront as a 3D Modeller,
and I was a Game Designer (Planner) in a game company. As a game creator,
there were a lot of frustrating things about working in a game company.
I was telling Hitotsuyanagi about how I wanted to make a game,
that I could be proud of, and would like to play for myself.
That’s when he told me about how he wanted to make
“games” and not just “assets” used in a game.
Naturally, we ended up creating this project together.
We faced a lot of problems, made a lot of changes to plans,
and made a lot of new friends to bring aboard the project,
but that’s a story for another time.
Game Concepts
The concepts for the “Wing of Darkness” project we started 3 years ago,
As a dev team of 2, isn’t actually so different to what it is now.
Our concepts are still the same.
1. Make sure the game gives players an exhilarating experience.
2. Give the game a proper story with convincing characters with a purpose.
3. Work on the games as professionals, and polish the areas we really want to deliver on.
These are our 3 main concepts.
As the producer, I believe that we have been able to stay true to the concepts we started with. We still haven’t been able to show you the story, but it is done!
With my background in game design, I can say for a fact,
that games that steer away from their original concept in the early phases,
tend to do very poorly, both in terms of sales and in terms of reception.
But for this game, I have the confidence that it is exactly,
what Hitotsuyanagi and I planned 3 years ago.
If the concept of the game is something you’re interested in,
we’d love for you to play the game for yourself!
I did want to talk about each concept in detail,
but that would require more pages of writing.
I wouldn’t want to turn these short newsletters into a long reading project,
so we’ll touch base with the concept details next time.
For the next issue,
I’d like to introduce some of the other members of“Production Exabilities”.
We’re a very unique bunch, so I’m excited to introduce the others to you all.
See you next week, and please enjoy your weekend!
This week's bonus
This week's bonus is video, this made from demo and concept sheet from the early development stage of
Wing of Darkness.
It's a private video that can only be seen here, so please enjoy it.
Producer Hifumi Nara
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