Inti Creates on Luminous Avenger IX’s development and why no Gunvolt 3, Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon talk

Next let’s talk a little about Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon. How did you become involved in its development?

Aizu: Well for starters, in 2015 we were involved in Mr. Koji Igarashi’s Kickstarter campaign for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night! We cooperated primarily for the sake of managing the campaign as well as artwork and initial development. From a developer’s viewpoint, we essentially donated art to the campaign, and some development when the campaign actually began. In the campaign there was a stretch goal promising the release of an 8-bit prequel game, and when it was achieved, we decided initially that we’d make them for handheld devices such as the 3DS and PlayStation Vita.

In coming up with the game, we felt that having a Metroidvania-style exploration-based game would be a little redundant, so we couldn’t just make the same game with different graphics. So, after some thought we decided on having the 8-bit game rely on a stage-clear type formula and set it as a stretch goal! To put it simply, we were a bit too busy with Curse of the Moon and other things to work on Ritual of the Night. Though, at the following year’s E3 in 2016, the playable Alpha demo of Ritual of the Night proved to be really popular! Eventually we had to hand off development on Ritual of the Night to another company and focused all of our efforts on the 8-bit game. That being said, Curse of the Moon was a game that we were consistently refining during its development.

So, Mr. Igarashi was responsible for the scenario and world building and Inti Creates was focused on the game design aspects… Who was in charge of directing the project?

Aizu: Mr. Hiroki Miyazawa – who was the planner for both Azure Striker Gunvolt and its sequel – was the director! He’s pretty well-known among fans for master-class Gunvolt streams. Of course, we figured that somebody so good at action games should be the director! Practically everybody that worked on it had worked on Gunvolt.

When playing Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, I couldn’t help but make comparisons to the older Castlevania games. Were the similarities intentional?

Aizu: In the past I’ve worked on Keiji Inafune’s games – this time I was working on a game by Koji Igarashi; I want to pay attention to the things that make the people that love their respective franchises love them. To that end, it was absolutely necessary to make a game that we knew that fans of Koji Igarashi’s work would love. So, in making Curse of the Moon we thought of things that characterized those games that fans might also think of: a certain visual style, the fixed direction and height of jumps, getting hit and knocked back into a hole, etc. I thought those kinds of things would appeal to Mr. Igarashi’s fans, so I established them as a part of the game’s design.

The visual style itself was inspired by our conceptualization of Ritual of the Night at the time. In addition to that, the soundtrack consists of some songs from Ritual of the Night arranged to fit the 8-bit theme so that they don’t seem out of place. At the time, the look of the game, the music, and its aesthetic were already kind of fixed, but other than that we could do what we wanted with the game. As I said, we made the game for fans of Mr. Igarashi’s previous work, so we also added things in like switching characters to discover new routes through the game – that’s the Curse of the Moon that we had decided on making.

And finally, do you have anything that you’d like to say to the fans who are anticipating your BitSummit presentation?

Aizu: Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon is a game that I – as its director – am proud of, and I am even more confident that it’ll make for an interesting playthrough! I’ve played it, and everybody else working in-house thinks that we’ve put out a really strong game, too; we’re releasing it on six different consoles and handhelds, so please pick it up for the system that you prefer! One last thing – we’ve just announced that Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX is now in development, so please stay tuned for more information in the coming future!

Thank you so much for today!

Translation by provided by Nico Thaxton on behalf of Nintendo Everything

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