Gaming
Games
Igarashi on the long-awaited arrival of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
After four long years in development, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is hitting all platforms on June 18, 2019. We sat down with Koji Igarashi to talk about the game’s long road to release.
It's been more than four years since famed Konami producer Koji Igarashi launched a Kickstarter campaign that raised over five million dollars for Castlevania-like adventure Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. Since then we've seen the game get huge delays and a complete visual overhaul – but Igarashi's vision has remained constant.
"Aside from the visuals, the core game is still the same," Igarashi, who is simply known as Iga, told us over a Skype call from Japan. "There are always challenges, certain parts of the game design that we have to rethink. But in this case, nothing has really changed."
Now, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is coming out on June 18 for Xbox One, PS4, and PC and then Nintendo Switch on June 25. Pre-orders have officially opened today, with a ten percent discount on all platforms. It's been a long time coming but the gothic sidescroller is finally at our doorstep.
The fervour around Bloodstained came from the love from the 1997 classic Castlevania: Symphony of the Night that Igarashi worked on. It's a source of inspiration not just for fans, but other game developers too. "There are a lot of fans that say they were inspired by Symphony of the Night," Iga said. "But there were games that came before me like Metroid and The Legend of Zelda that did more work in that regard – we just pushed things in that direction."
The producer even attended Bitsummit, a gathering of indie developers in Kyoto, in 2017 to play some games that his work inspired. The Metroidvania genre, which was partly inspired by Igarashi, has exploded with new games like Hollow Knight and Dead Cells expanding on what it meant to have Metroidvania-esque exploration. Bloodstained, however, is all about staying true to its roots.
"For Bloodstained in particular, it follows the original design, not based on other Metroidvania games, but in terms of myself as a developer," Iga said. "I decided to keep it with the original Castlevania design choices. The backers and fans will think that the game feels old-school, which is still fun. They want to play this type of game again."
Rather than adopt some of the innovations of recent games, Igarashi wanted to focus on capturing the nostalgic feeling of playing through Symphony of the Night again, although that doesn't mean there won't be improvements. The team at ArtPlay have included a revamped UI, easy-to-read map, with some difficulty options to help players through the winding paths of the castles they'll explore.
"There are still huge risks we're taking," Iga said. "One is that the map is a lot larger and there’s more exploration to it and there are also way more collectable features. This is probably the largest amount of items you can collect and craft in a game like this."
A visual overhaul
When Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was first revealed (as well as several trailers afterwards), fans were incredibly unhappy with the look of the game. Igarashi and his team took that response to heart.
"It was very different from what we expected – we didn't see that response coming," he said. "We thought we put out what was best at the time. Although the comments really motivated our technical artists and staff. It lit up something in our development."
ArtPlay, the studio Iga helped create and its partners went back and completely reworked how the game looked, with its mishmash of 2D and 3D visuals. They updated the lighting of every room, got better 3D models from development partners Wayforward and found a way to make the game more vibrant without sacrificing engine performance.
It was all part of a frustrating learning experience for Igarashi and his team, who'd never worked on a crowdfunded project before. They'd never worked with fans on such a direct level on a vision that had to remain unaltered for the course of the development. Fans had donated to a game that Iga showed them years ago – they couldn't stray from what they'd already showed off.
"There were a lot of promises we had to keep that we wouldn't in other types of development – we weren't able to throw that stuff away," Iga said. "Basically the way we've worked on previous games with multiple modes, development started out on the story mode – everything else would be an extra if we had time."
Iga talked about the speedrun mode they had promised to backers and how it would've been cut in a regular development cycle. "We had to work on everything within one schedule," he said. "It threw things off a bit."
Following Miriam as she tries to protect humanity from demons
© ArtPlay
No pressure
This was a different type of challenge for Igarashi and his team. He established a company, worked with contract companies for parts of the development and raised over five million dollars, all for the first time. It was four years worth of learning experiences they wouldn't have got any other way.
The hybrid visuals were also something they hadn't done before. "The 3D part of it, there's a lot of issues we face that gave us different technical issues that we've never faced before," Iga said. "Hitboxes didn't match where they were supposed to because of the perspective. We would have to shift the position of the characters to make things look like they were getting hit."
The map, which ArtPlay have said would be the biggest they'd ever worked on, was also a new challenge. They wanted to make sure the player could explore without getting confused. "We want to get the player to explore the map without worry," Iga said. "It isn't meant for players to get lost, that's not what we want. We want them to follow certain pathways to reach the next part of the game. They can go a bit off track, but we give them an easy way to get to where they are supposed to go. "
These new challenges including the art style, size of the map, as well as the fact they raised so much money, didn't faze Igarashi at all over the past several years. He's been in game development for almost 30 years, preparing him for an intense amount of pressure while working on Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.
"I never expected this much support, but at the same time I didn't feel any more pressure than I usually did," he said. "Previous games in the Castlevania series were part of a large franchise and that had a lot of pressure to keep going. It's the same, we're still developing a game that we wanted to make the best."
