Okamiden will leap onto the Nintendo DS in early 2011. From now until launch we were lucky enough to secure some developer insights and time from the R&D team in Japan. Here is the first of a few developer blogs to come…

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Hello everyone,

I’m Motohide Eshiro, producer of OKAMIDEN.

Starting from CAPTIVATE X in April, OKAMIDEN has been presented to you at E3, San Diego Comic-Con, and PAX and we in the development team are all very pleased to receive tremendous positive reactions and praises from foreign media and gaming fans!

We really appreciate it, thank you!!

So, with our pleasant meeting, Matsushita, the director of OKAMIDEN, and I will provide you real voices from the development team and useful information about OKAMIDEN in this blog from now on, so please give your attention to this blog for a while.

Well, this is the first blog, so let me tell you about how I got to start this OKAMIDEN project a little bit.

When was that, you ask?

That was actually at the end of the stage of one of my old projects, when I was really busy finishing up the project.

The director Matsushita suddenly came to me him holding a Nintendo DS in his hand and saying that he wanted to show me something.

Matsushita: Eshiro-san, can you please look at this?

Eshiro: Wow!! What’s this! I remember that I’ve seen the white dog…no no no, that’s a wolf, it’s running!

Matsushita: Hehehe, isn’t this amazing? We’ve developed this pre-production version of OKAMIDEN with OKAMI-LOVE dev staffs voluntarily 

Eshiro: OMG…Voluntarily developed… (sweating). Now I know what you guys were doing in secret. This looks pretty good at this stage of pre-production, I think. Is there a design doc for this?

Matsushita: Matsushita: I knew you’re going to ask me about that already, and here you go (flump sound). We can start anytime!  

This is how I got to start the project, a little bit of exaggeration, but it was really unusual that Director Matsushita suddenly presented it to me and suddenly that’s the starting point of this OKAMIDEN project. 

As we started this project officially, there’s one thing we had to achieve in my mind, and that’s how were we going to be able to reflect and implement the original OKAMI world, beautiful world and graphics on Nintendo DS? I wondered…

 If it’s too difficult to achieve, I didn’t think that it’s worth starting this project at all I decided.

 Since then, the director Matsushita and dev team’s struggling days has started.

Several months later…

The dev team succeeded to integrate the maximum spec for Nintendo DS by putting huge creative and technical efforts into their work. We could see that Chibi with Kuni on its back was up and running, full of energy in the Kamiki Village stage and all this reflected perfectly as a sample slice of the beautiful OKAMI world without missing the original taste.

“This is going to be an awesome game!!”

I felt solidly confident and decided to start this OKAMIDEN project officially in my heart then. And, of course, there have been a lot of things happened up until this day, but I’ll hold them for next blog opportunity…

See you again, everybody!!