Level-5 CEO on Wonder Flick bridging the console/smartphone gap, looking to the future
The following comes from a Famitsu interview with Level-5 CEO Akihiro Hino...
"I never stick to the project document when we're making games, which usually attracts a lot of ire from people around me. But I think you need to put in the elements that gamers think are fun, regardless of whether that showed up in the spec sheet. That won't necessarily be what you think it is at first, after all; you'll realize later on that 'oh, it'd be a lot more fun if it were like this'. If you don't work that way, I don't think you can create great entertainment. I hate working strictly by the spec sheet.
The way I think about games doesn't change with smartphone development, but the theory behind how games are made is completely different. With console games... For example, if you're making some kind of epic RPG, then it could take three minutes just to travel from town to the next dungeon. If you made a smartphone game that played by console rules, it simply wouldn't work, because you need to give smartphone gamers a complete and meaningful experience in those three minutes. That's why we're trying to have Wonder Flick, which we're working on now, be a game that reflects the environment you play it in.
When I listened to the pitches for how hardware manufacturers conceptualized the current console generation, I thought that consoles needed to find a way to exist alongside smartphones to survive. We're not in an age where it's just 'I like games, so I have a console' or 'I like playing outside, so I have a portable'. You're playing console games, and you're also playing smartphone games in a whole different environment. When you think about it that way, the question becomes: If you really enjoy a smartphone game, get lost in the world and feel real emotions from it, then why throw that all away once you're back in your living room? That's what we're attempting with Wonder Flick; we're trying to provide a different but enjoyable play experience on consoles and smartphones.
This isn't something we're making ourselves yet, but I think the ultimate point that games have yet to reach is virtual reality. The ultimate game, I think, lets you really enjoy things in a virtual world that you couldn't in real life. And if you look at the sort of titles getting announced now, wouldn't you say we're at the point where you can simulate the real world pretty well in a virtual reality? I think we're at the point where we'll see games that give you the same experiences in real life, like somebody in the monitor you can chat with, and I'd like to make a game like that. Games are fun, after all, because they let you do things that are impossible in real life. Maybe this won't happen until we're a few more years into the next hardware cycle, but four or five years down the line, I think we might see games like that."
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"I never stick to the project document when we're making games, which usually attracts a lot of ire from people around me. But I think you need to put in the elements that gamers think are fun, regardless of whether that showed up in the spec sheet. That won't necessarily be what you think it is at first, after all; you'll realize later on that 'oh, it'd be a lot more fun if it were like this'. If you don't work that way, I don't think you can create great entertainment. I hate working strictly by the spec sheet.
The way I think about games doesn't change with smartphone development, but the theory behind how games are made is completely different. With console games... For example, if you're making some kind of epic RPG, then it could take three minutes just to travel from town to the next dungeon. If you made a smartphone game that played by console rules, it simply wouldn't work, because you need to give smartphone gamers a complete and meaningful experience in those three minutes. That's why we're trying to have Wonder Flick, which we're working on now, be a game that reflects the environment you play it in.
When I listened to the pitches for how hardware manufacturers conceptualized the current console generation, I thought that consoles needed to find a way to exist alongside smartphones to survive. We're not in an age where it's just 'I like games, so I have a console' or 'I like playing outside, so I have a portable'. You're playing console games, and you're also playing smartphone games in a whole different environment. When you think about it that way, the question becomes: If you really enjoy a smartphone game, get lost in the world and feel real emotions from it, then why throw that all away once you're back in your living room? That's what we're attempting with Wonder Flick; we're trying to provide a different but enjoyable play experience on consoles and smartphones.
This isn't something we're making ourselves yet, but I think the ultimate point that games have yet to reach is virtual reality. The ultimate game, I think, lets you really enjoy things in a virtual world that you couldn't in real life. And if you look at the sort of titles getting announced now, wouldn't you say we're at the point where you can simulate the real world pretty well in a virtual reality? I think we're at the point where we'll see games that give you the same experiences in real life, like somebody in the monitor you can chat with, and I'd like to make a game like that. Games are fun, after all, because they let you do things that are impossible in real life. Maybe this won't happen until we're a few more years into the next hardware cycle, but four or five years down the line, I think we might see games like that."
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