Design Blog

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Anime Expo 2009

From July 2-5 I was in Los Angeles to check out Anime Expo 2009. It was a really fun trip and I had a ton of fun. AX is considered to be the biggest anime convention on the west coast and there were an estimated 44000 people in attendance this year. I saw some great bands, played some games, saw some movies, checked out some previews for things to come from the anime industry and even attended some informative and entertaining workshops.

But the best part was that I got to meet Daisuke Ishiwatari and Toshimichi Mori. Ishiwatari is the designer for Guilty Gear as well as the composer for BlazBlue, while Mori was the lead designer and artist for BlazBlue.

I also got the chance to ask the two of them some questions about game design during the two panels that they had. Because the question/answer period was quick their responses weren't that detailed, but they offered some interesting ideas about the games they worked on.

When I asked about what they felt was important in designing games, Ishiwatari said that he felt it was important for games to have either cooperative or competitive elements to them, since these were the things that would keep players playing the game for longer. After the queestion, Mori then asked me if I was trying to get into the game industry. I think he was a little surprised when I told him that I'd already been working in it. I hope I can design something in the future that will impress them.

Later at the second panel I asked them what the biggest design challenges they had when designing BlazBlue and Guilty Gear. Ishiwatari said that for Guilty Gear the biggest challenge was adapting the game for arcades, since the original game was designed for consoles. He said he did a lot of research into the kinds of things that would get players to keep putting quarters into the machine. Mori said that for BlazBlue the most difficult thing was getting good networking for the game. For fighting games like BlazBlue this kind of thing is fairly difficult, though I've heard that in general BlazBlue's online play is fairly solid.

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All in all, it was a great trip and it was pretty neat to meet the creators of the games I've been enjoying for so long. I hope I can make it to Anime Expo next year as well.

I'll end this post with a quote from Ishiwatari from an earlier interview:

"I look forward to seeing new designers come into the industry with a burning passion to create."

Reading this I'm motivated to keep working hard in order to live up to his expectations.

Labels: anime expo, blazblue, design philosophy, game industry, game mechanics

posted by Saikyo at 9:33 PM