The Director on Okamiden, Matsushita-san, recently took the time to answer some of the questions you Capcom-Unity members have asked about the game. The answers to the questions are in blue! Read on after the jump. 

How did the team go about creating the new versions of the other animal gods?

At first, we thought about what kinds of new celestial brushes are good to have in the game – cool ones to use in battles, puzzle solving and interactions with gimmicks, something entertaining.

After we came up with the mechanism of the celestial brush, we applied animals to be the most fitted and select the ones that seem godly for each brush.  Then we asked our character designer to come up with artworks and picked the ones that fit best for each celestial brush.

Was it hard to translate the art style from a PS2/Wii game to the DS?

Yes, it was painfully hard.  I thought I would give up many times during that process.

We knew that our audience would not accept “Okamiden” if we couldn’t bring that artistic style of “Okami (PS2/Wii)”.  I even thought that we shouldn’t sell this game if that art style was not there.  But I was on the same page with everybody else in the dev team about this and believed that this was the golden rule, and because of we had a very clear goal, we were able to recreate the art style of “Okami” that was on the PS2/Wii.

We had to go through a long grueling process of trial and error.  For instance, the character designer would do his design freely and then the modeler would figure out how they can implement that in the game with less polygons and bones, but sometimes the modeler just had to go back to the character designer to do tweaks on the original character design itself.  Speaking of programmers, they worked hard on the whole developing process to optimize the processing and rendering speed, collision system, and graphic system.

All these tough times we have spent led to recreating the art style of “Okami” from PS2/Wii.  Again, it was such a difficult situation, someone could have just run away, but every single person in the team including me did not give up and did our best until the end of development.

What notable improvements or compromises were made that aren’t in the console okami game?

Regarding improvements we’ve made, it all comes down to the fact that we have fortified the sense of unity among each partner and Chibi to help each other and fight together in battles, and solving puzzles together.  As everyone is aware, Okami (PS2/Wii) is such a great game, it’s not the improvement that we did, but rather the enhancement of every little element.  Something we compromised was the design for Sakuya’s behind.  To tell you the truth, I still regret it! lol

Why is Okamiden chibi? why not just a sequel or something? In other words: why is everything so CUTE?!?!

Originally, Chibi was pulled off its trigger by one of our character designers who came up saying, “check this out, baby Ammy!” as a little fun thing.

Right after I saw this rough art, the following ideas started filling my mind…

• A wolf pup
• A wolf pup probably won’t be able to save the world alone
• Would that be possible with the help of others?
• Then how about partnering a child of a human with a child of a god?
• A story of one wolf pup and a child growing up
• If both are kids, it has to be cute!

 The cute factor of Okamiden is only the outcome, we never had a goal of creating a cute game.  Well, there were certainly quite a few things that I intentionally made it turn out cute… lol

As an aspiring concept/character artist, i would like to know the concept process of creating characters, and worlds in okami. Is it just one lone artist creating all the characters, or is it a whole team ? Does the artist stay for the long haul and oversee other aspects of character render, or do you outsource temp artist at the beginning to come up with concept art? 

In regards to the character design, it was usually the character designer and I with other staff who work on the character (including game designer, model designer, and programmer) got together and discussed what kind of character is good, and came up with a concept.

Once we have the concept, the character designer started to work on the design based on that concept.  This character designer is the only person who worked throughout the whole development on Okamiden.  The reason for this was for consistency throughout the whole game, it’s like having one director on each game.  So the character designer and the director supervised and adjusted models based on the design concept which was created at first.

This character designer I’m talking about had been there from the very beginning of the development process but he lost energy towards the end, but still helped out with bug check even though he was feeling woozy.  Of course, I was feeling the same too, we made our last-ditch effort… lol