As it continues to bring its flavour of the Japanese hardcore shooter to broader audiences with the release of Espgaluda II on iPad 2, we talk to Cave's CEO and lead programmer Tsuneki Ikeda and smartphone department head Yukihiro Masaki about its very personal revolution - one in which it's resolutely sticking to its roots.
What was the response to DoDonPachi Resurrection on iOS? Has it encouraged your design/development/production decisions since?
Yukihiro Masaki I’m not sure whether it’s because we added a lot of features to the game after the first app, we had a huge response from the users. Thanks to all that great feedback we earned the Best Action/Arcade Game award for iPhone and iPod Touch in the Pocket Gamer Awards 2011. Whether or not that’s influenced our design and development decisions for the games that we’ve put out afterwards is hard to say, but I think it was a success in getting people familiar with Cave shooting.
How much of your audience, since moving to iOS and console development, is Japanese? Has your userbase changed since you started working in mobile development?
YM The majority of our core userbase is in Japan, although it varies with the game and platform. We’re very happy that we have a dedicated userbase overseas that continues to grow and for some of our iOS games nearly 50 per cent of sales have been overseas.
Are you annoyed at the lack of movement precision on iOS? Is it subtly changing the way you make games?
YM The big feature of smartphones is that unlike console games, they don’t have an analog stick, and I think for casual players this is actually easier to control their ship. If I could raise one issue, certainly your finger covers up your ship while you’re controlling it. We had a lot of feedback like this about Deathsmiles, which is one of our horizontal shooters. I think there’s still room to improve that in the future.
A number of Japanese developers and publishers have shifted their focus, and their IPs, to appeal more to western tastes – Cave has stayed staunchly true to its roots. Why?
TI I think the biggest reason that we’ve stuck to our roots so to speak is that we’ve been making games so long for the domestic market. But the most essential reason is probably simply that in the process of creating the finished product, we unconsciously add a certain Cave flavour to it. Honestly, I think in this sense it’s inevitable that the design tends to head in the same direction.
What is the current state of the Japanese arcade scene?
TI Compared to a few years ago, it’s in a pretty tough spot. Especially for games that are built to be placed in general-purpose cabinets, the situation is even harder as arcades that handle these types of games are fewer in number.
Comments
2Which Lazrhog solved for his port of Rrootage before the App Store even appeared. Good scaling of touch to movement, too; I felt that controlled way better than any of Cave's efforts I've played.
While I've enjoyed a number of Cave and Toaplan games over the years, their iOS pricing is a bit high. $9-12 for a shmup on an iPhone is a bit excessive, no matter how good. At $5-7, they'd sell significantly more units.