A portion of a Siliconera interview with Director Takayuki Isobe...

S: Solatorobo: Red the Hunter was in development for over 10 years. How has the game evolved from its original design?

Takayuki Isobe, Director: Solatorobo took 10 years in planning and 3 years in development. During the 10-year planning stage we really hammered out the details of the world view and a variety of viewpoints. From there we moved on to how the game would be played. After those details were worked out, there was a period of trying out various directions on implementing more humans or having a world where dog-people, cat-people and humans coexist and play as teammates, etc. Because we were able to have this time to try out all the aspects, I believe we were able to achieve the current concept with such a solid background.

At the start of the development the team consisted of a small number of staff. The gameplay was a generic action game where the robots hit the enemies to defeat them. However, it was too ordinary and nothing really popped out when playing the game, so we decided to implement a grab and throw element and rebuilt the gameplay accordingly.

When changing the gameplay, and before we found the right effects to implement, I’m sure a lot of the staff members were unsure how it would all turn out. By trial and error we were able to get it right, though, and I think it’s a style that makes for an interesting game.

Also, the demo and towns’ backgrounds were originally simple overlapping 2D illustrations, but during development we created the current 2.5D effect by using the motion illustration demo and camera mapping to have more depth in the background.