Here’s a confession: I’m fascinated by game design. As someone with very few creative impulses of his own, I love reading creative people describe how they get work done. Thankfully, Platinum Games boss Hideki Kamiya has been indulging me with what he calls the “Bayo-blog,” a dev blog about (you guessed it!) Bayonetta. Over the past few months, different members of the Bayonetta team have come in to describe a little bit about what they do, and the different decisions they’ve had to make during the development process.
Scrolling through about three pages of entries, you can find articles about character and enemy models, animation, scoring, and world and weapons designs. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that the entire game seems to be built around Kamiya-san’s vision of who and what Bayonetta should be. That is to say, a modern witch who slaughters angels because she’s got guns on her f*cking feet.
For example, Bayonetta’s hands, feet, and guns (cryptically named Scaraborough Fair) are all red because it’s eye-catching and will help players keep track of things during firefights, dishes designer Johnny Kotegawa. Similarly, Bayonetta‘s music was designed, according to composer Hiroshi Yamaguchi, to strike a balance between the heavy action and “idea of femininity.” To that end, Yamaguchi “used ‘beautiful’ instruments like pianos, electric pianos, organs, vibraphones, flutes, double bass, and a female chorus.”
The very world that Bayonetta takes place in was designed for her as well. “As our lead character is a thin, sexy woman, the world behind her is the opposite. We went with large, heavy environments so we wouldn’t fall into the trap of letting her dynamic silhouette be lost in the shuffle,” explains Ikumi Nakamura, who is in charge of Bayonetta‘s concept design.
Anyway, I could spend days soaking up interesting factoids (like how the animators “root for the enemy“) and looking at concept art, but I’ll let you guys check out the Bayonetta blog for yourselves. It’s a slow news day, and it’s not like you guys have anything better to do. Like, y’know, actually play videogames or anything.
Bayonetta will be out later this year. If you want some more info on it, we’ve been talking about for months.
[Via Offworld]
