Monolith Soft talks Wii U – prepared for HD development, want to show Japanese tech doesn’t lose out to America, more
Like Satoru Iwata’s interview with Mashiro Sakurai regarding the next Smash Bros. games, Monolith Soft posted an interview on their website involving their next Wii U project. By discussing their ambitions and goals, the company hopes to attract new employees.
Monolith CEO Hirohide Sugiura. Toshiaki Yajima (main programmer on Xenosaga and Dragon Ball Kai), Katsunori Sakai (main programmer on Xenoblade, event system programmer on Disaster) and Michihiko Inaba (Xenosaga, Soma Bringer) all participated in the interview. You can read up on what they had to say below:
– Monolith Soft has been doing continuous research/development on other company’s products including HD machines
– Sugiura thinks that the company will be able to show the fruits of their work with Wii U
– Yajima says that they’ve been doing R&D for awhile now, so they aren’t experiencing issues on the technical front even though this is their first HD game
– Yajima believes that the potential expressive ability of the game has risen because they can use physics and shaders
– Yajima feels that they can really show their skills as programmers as a result
– Inaba interested in Wii U’s controller, could be interesting to play on the TV and the second screen
– Yajima wants to try out the controller quickly and possibly show different things on each screen
– Inaba wants to make something that surprises everyone since it’s Monolith’s first HD game
– Inaba wants to show that Japanese technology does not lose out to America
– Inaba said that he wants to be at the level of Bethesda Softworks, but joked that maybe he’s going too far
– Sakai excited about the design document for their Wii U game since it would require a high level from the staff
– Yajima wants many people with specific knowledge in such areas as Havok and Shaders
– When trying to portray realistic expressions on the screen, you end up needing to use external programming libraries
– Sakai wants people who are interested in using such libraries for game development
Thanks to Thomas N for the tip!
