The style is quite distinctive, between bright sunny areas that have a somewhat overexposed look, and lots of creepy shadow creatures crawling around. What are you going for with this style?
Tsuchihashi:I tried to recreate the light that occurs when the sunset light is right about to hit the park grounds. As I mentioned before, the concept of this game is taken from Shadow Tag, and I wanted to try to relay the feeling of playing in the horizontal sunlight as a child.
A similar case can be said for the enemies. The enemies that you encounter can be thought of as the chaser, who is "it." They can be terrifying, and some of them may even inspire that boogeyman feeling that we feared as children.
It might simply have been that I was getting a little tired at E3, but as far as demos go I found some of the Lost in Shadow gameplay rather challenging, though not unpleasantly or unfairly so. Are you aiming for a good level of challenge with this game?
Tsuchihashi:The level of challenge in any game, must be thoroughly considered and prioritized. In my experience, when you're the one creating the game, you tend to make it more and more difficult because you already know the game so well... To tell you the truth, I think this game is set to be more difficult than Kororinpa. The fact that players interact with shadows, something that they may not be not used to, adds to the sense of difficulty here.
I was told by a producer at the show that even though the demo seemed huge, that there was a lot of content in the game, and certainly there was quite a bit in the screenshots I had yet to see. Can you put some numbers to the size of the game, i.e. levels or time to complete?
Tsuchihashi:Let's just say that the version we used for the E3 demo was about a third of the whole game. So there's plenty more where that came from!
In a Nintendo Power interview some months ago, I was interested to read that you were using the level editor from Marble Saga Kororinpa (which was one of my favorite parts of that game, very well done!) to build the levels for this game. Similarly, might we see an opportunity to create our own Lost in Shadow levels?
Tsuchihashi:The task of including a level editor into a retail game is a very challenging one. There is a level editor in Kororinpa 2 (Marble Saga), but we have found that that single addition will add numerous hours to the debug process, since certain controls that weren't intended on our part may result in a system crash. Now, if this were done with the dev kits in the comfort of our own office, all we have to do is laugh and reboot, but we cannot have players feel the same frustration with our product in the comfort of their homes.
I do have to admit that creating stages out of shadows is pretty entertaining, although very time-consuming. If there was ever a time for us to be able to provide the users with a compatible editor, that would be the day that we, the developers, will be content in knowing that we have provided them with the "complete version" of Lost In Shadow.
Do you have any other thoughts or messages to share with our readers?
Tsuchihashi:This is a unique game that asks you to re-imagine the shadows that we all see underneath ourselves in our everyday lives. Your shadow may suddenly go off by itself one of these days... Try out this game to prepare for that day, for both you and for your shadow.
Thank you for your time, and for creating Lost in Shadow; I found it very fresh and enjoyable at the show, and am looking forward to its release this year. Best of luck with the game and all your future endeavors!
Tsuchihashi:I thank you for this opportunity.
I will continue to do my best to create games that stay embedded in people's memory.
's release date is as-of-yet unannounced, but it is planned for this year and already has its ESRB rating—so it likely won't be long. I'm very much looking forward to playing the game in full.
