Inti Creates president on how the studio makes its games
During a recent Mighty No. 9 podcast, Inti Creates tackled a fan question about game development. Takuya Aizu, president and CEO of the studio, handled the response.
Aizu said the following regarding what order Inti Creates designs levels for their games in:
“Usually, in normal development, we usually create the intro stage first and then create the last stage next, and we were taught that that’s how you make good games.
That’s how we’ve been doing it in many situations, but in current days, we’ve been in situations where we’ve been asked to submit a vertical slice. So basically, if we start creating the intro first, we’re not able to show a good vertical slice.
So, what we do is—and this is what we’re doing in this case—we pick one of the normal stages and we create it, and we create it in a way that you could play it over and over again, so people can judge what the game is going to be like. And then we move on to the intro stage, and then create the last stage.
That’s the ideal way of moving, but a lot of times, the designs for the last boss comes in later during development, so sometimes we’re not able to do the ideal case of making the last boss stage after the intro boss stage, because the designs aren’t ready.”
With Mighty No. 9, the Mighty No. 5 stage acts as the game’s vertical slice stage. Aizu also said during the podcast that Inti Creates provides Keiji Inafune with a playable ROM once a month or more while considering his feedback.
