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Shenmue III - PS4/PC | Out Now!

Revival

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smac

smac

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Dear god, I don't want to see Yu Suzuki's flow charts... It's like looking at your dads underpants.. it's horrific, the lines in the middle aren't in the middle, boxes aren't equally spaced, honestly - let alone the question marks! -

Awful

Your dad has question marks in his underpants? Is he The Riddler?

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mushashi

mushashi

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Suzuki's given another interview to Famitsu with some updates to a few topics:

Q: (laughs) By the way, approximately 780m yen was raised through the Kickstarter campaign; do you have plans for other ways to accept funding?

YS: I'm planning on accepting funding via PayPal. It is still being coordinated so I can't give details at the moment, but progress is being made on getting it ready.

Q: Depending on the amount of further funding, is there a possibility that stretch goals not reached during the Kickstarter campaign will be included?

YS: I would like to add them if possible. Kickstarter is a non-Japanese site and so I think it may have been hard for Japanese people to use. Even for the mailing address entry, people may have worried that making a slight mistake might result in their rewards not being delivered. So when accepting funding through PayPal, I'd like to ensure it supports Japanese language.

Q: That makes sense. With Japanese support, fans in Japan will feel relieved, won't they. Development work on Shenmue 3 will start in earnest from here, so are there any roles you are particularly looking for to help the development move forward?

YS: I would especially welcome any planners or programmers who would like to work together with us. Development will be carried out with Unreal Engine, so I'd be happy if they have experience in Unreal Engine development as well as in development for the home game market.

So if anybody knows anybody with the necessary skillset who wants to work on the game, send in your CV. :)

Q: Next I'd like to ask you in more detail about what kind of game Shenmue 3 will be. Firstly, there wasn't a stretch goal for "Japanese language support" in the stretch goals revealed on the Kickstarter site. But since Masaya Matsukaze has been announced as the voice actor for the lead character of Ryo Hazuki, there will be Japanese-language support, won't there?

YS: That's right. I won't be able to express subtle nuances unless I make it in Japanese first. After the Japanese version we'll make the English version, and then support for other languages will follow.

Q: So although the video for the Kickstarter project had the main character speaking in English, development of the game will be carried out with Japanese voices?

YS: Yes.

Q: So Bailu village will feature in the story as somewhere to enjoy the scenery, while Choubu will be where you can enjoy open-world gameplay like in the previous game?

YS: Yes, although the word "open-world" may lead to misunderstanding as there are now many great open world games around…. Choubu is a place with "Shenmue-like" gameplay - what I called FREE for the earlier Shenmue games. I consider Bailu village to be a place where you can enjoy spending time with Shenhua. And for Baisha, I'm planning to make it a place where you can play in completely different way from the earlier Shenmue games. It's the place I want to focus on most.

Q: Could you give a little more detail about Baisha?

YS: It has several enemy hideouts, and you can enjoy the situation of infiltrating one; protecting your friends from external attack as you battle with enemies to take it over. You will not simply be fighting, but will make full use of war tactics that resemble famous tactics from China's Three Kingdoms period, such as the Water Attack or the Fire Attack, as you fight. This may sound very difficult, but I plan to make it straight-forward when you try playing, so please don't worry about that.

Q: In a previous interview, you mentioned being able to change your player character during these operations, didn't you?

YS: That would be the stretch goal that was successfully reached during the Kickstarter, called the Character Perspective system. I'd like to allow you to be able to play not just as Ryo, but also as others like Shenhua and Ren, and clearly portray the characteristics of each of the characters. For example… Shenhua, a girl, wouldn't do something like suddenly hit someone else.

Q: She doesn't seem like the type to do that, does she.

YS: And so, if you have selected Shenhua, you won't have the option to hit. However, if it is Ren, he may well suddenly strike out (laughs). In this way, depending on the character the things you can do differ, and depending on your choice the outcome will change. I'd also like to portray the differences between men and women.

Q: Between men and women?

YS: In the places where Character Perspective occurs, there are events where you advance as a pair. At that time, if you are controlling Ren then he'll be like "Hey, I'm so cool" and try to put on an act, whereas if you control Shenhua she'll look at his posing and think "What an idiot…" - that kind of thing (laughs).

It's something that happens in real life too, right? It is said that if you talk to two people that have had an argument, they will give you completely different stories about it, although they have experienced the same thing. I'd like to express the difference in values between men and women, as well as the kind of everyday life situations that everyone can relate to. I don't think many games have delved into this kind of thing deeply, so I think it will be an attractive new aspect of Shenmue which sets it apart from other games, as well as from the previous chapters.

http://www.shenmuedojo.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=49050&sid=c161b24ab022b2e615c9300543a1ecf2

This is only the first part of the interview, the 2nd part is still being translated.

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Corrogate

Corrogate

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I read that about the Japanese; it just seems to be a bit of a cheek. We need $2 million to make this game. Okay, game development confirmed.

Anything past that is an increase in the profit margin, right?

I suppose if they put the money into HR they could speed up production time.

Sorry if I seem negative, I'm glad the game's coming, it's just like, where does it end? How much will you have paid before you have to shell out for the game?

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Mr. Gerbik

Mr. Gerbik

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That's not how it works. Two million is nothing in terms of game development. Two millions gets you the most basic version of the game, with as few unique assets as possible and therefore probably only one location. More development budget means an increase of the scope of the game. Adding more detail, more locations, more polish, more characters - that all means more work which means keeping people on staff longer and an exponentially increasing cost. But even if you want to ignore all that, this is simply how crowd funding works and has always worked ever since the Double Fine Adventure kickstarter. People who want to donate after the kickstarter campaign is over, are offered the chance to do so and the developer in turn is able to put more work in the project. There's absolutely nothing cheecky about it. The safest option is always to wait until the game is out (same goes for early access and pre-orders) and buy it then based on reviews. Don't donate unless you really know it's a donation with all the usual risks involved.

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Uzi

Uzi

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I read that about the Japanese; it just seems to be a bit of a cheek. We need $2 million to make this game. Okay, game development confirmed.

Anything past that is an increase in the profit margin, right?

I suppose if they put the money into HR they could speed up production time.

Sorry if I seem negative, I'm glad the game's coming, it's just like, where does it end? How much will you have paid before you have to shell out for the game?

2 million was the bare minimum to get the game to go ahead, it is not the development budget and additional funding is not profit - it is for more development scope. They didn't come close to hitting their KS goals (which went up to 11-12 million if I remember) and people were happy that additional funding would be available so the dev budget could be increased and more features/things to do ultimately included. You do realised 6 million is a small amount for a game of this scope? How much someone will have paid is completely optional - they could have paid as little as 29 dollars and they still get the game. But if the game gets more funding as they go along, that game will be better.

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Corrogate

Corrogate

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Oh yeah, I'm well aware it's only a small fraction of the production cost. Anyway, I didn't pay shit forward, suppose it's up to those who want to.

I do feel like crowd sourcing cheapens the game personally; if it's an indie studio with a great concept and they're driving desire, then I can see it, but it makes me wonder how committed to actually putting into the game the studio is with such a high profile, much anticipated game like Shenmue 3.

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Uzi

Uzi

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It's not a high profile game sales wise or it would have never needed kickstarter and 14 years to be made. S1 and 2 were financial failures - they lost money. This is about money and development viability, not peoples personal idea of what counts as an indie game.

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mushashi

mushashi

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All the biggest Kickstarter funding hits are from devs who used to work for publishers so it seems a bit late to be complaining about who uses Kickstarter to raise funding at this point in time :P

I suspect most niche games will have to rely on crowdfunding or other pre-order sources to continue making product people want to buy, and that is certainly the state of evidence from games which people would argue were successful commercially. Double Fine seem to have pissed off enough people at this point that they aren't automatically going that route, instead doing publisher-funded projects.

Fingers crossed Shenmue III makes enough money when it is released to convince a publisher to shoulder the risk next time.

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rafaqat

rafaqat

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It's a bit odd that he's asking for anyone who has unreal engine experience to help out. The cost of getting randoms up to speed and working effectively globally is going to be a hit in cost and efficiency of any existing team of devs. Seems very odd to be soliciting for help at this stage. Has he said anywhere whether he has an actual team size in mind. Seems very "hey everyone pitch in" at the moment. Doesn't seem very controlled

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Rev

Rev

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It's a bit odd that he's asking for anyone who has unreal engine experience to help out. The cost of getting randoms up to speed and working effectively globally is going to be a hit in cost and efficiency of any existing team of devs. Seems very odd to be soliciting for help at this stage. Has he said anywhere whether he has an actual team size in mind. Seems very "hey everyone pitch in" at the moment. Doesn't seem very controlled

I suspect that might be a white lie. Ie. They need one more artist and they'll probably hire through a newspaper or whatever, but why not, let people send in their CV.

I didn't say it had to be reserved for indie titles, but that's what I'd expect to see on a Kickstarter. I'm just listening to a guy explain it a bit in further, receiving little backing from Sega etc, now it makes sense.

Edit: haha, that's the one.

Kickstarter is a very strange beast. I've spent quite a lot of time looking through it, tracking successes and failures and there's really no logic to what games do well and which fail once you've removed obvious outliers.

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mushashi

mushashi

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It's a bit odd that he's asking for anyone who has unreal engine experience to help out. The cost of getting randoms up to speed and working effectively globally is going to be a hit in cost and efficiency of any existing team of devs. Seems very odd to be soliciting for help at this stage. Has he said anywhere whether he has an actual team size in mind. Seems very "hey everyone pitch in" at the moment. Doesn't seem very controlled

They aren't at the full production stage yet, as he knows the budget, he's been working on scoping out the project to that budget and finalising the story elements. They still need staff to ramp up the production stage, the primary developer is run by the former lead programmer but as his company is an indie, he doesn't have the necessary staffing levels to cope with a project of this size so they are hiring. IIRC there were complaints from other devs at the time Shenmue was being made that they'd sucked up all the dev resources to get that game out of the door.

Even big developers are on a continual hiring process if you keep an eye on the job ads.

Ron Gilbert had a really interesting post about how development works for indie projects, and the sorts of things you need to budget for and when staff might be needed:

http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/budget1

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