“Patapon Remastered" is now out, which is the PlayStation 4 version of the original version, “Patapon,” from the PlayStation Portable era. Game producer Hiroyuki Kotani and sound designer Kemmei Adachi were interviewed recently by PlayStation Blog and revealed some interesting bits of information about the game.
Game inspiration came from character design
The original version of the video game was launched on the PSP in 2007 and it was designed by Sony and Pyramid. Kotani revealed that the design of the cute characters in the video game was inspired by the character designs done by Rolito, a French artist.
After showing the designs to him, he was drawn to them and he told Interlink Planning, who showed the designs, that he was interested in the artist’s work.
Kotani also revealed that he proposed a game of a strategy type which would use war drums incorporating the characters in it. Pyramid, at the time of the launch of PSP, was the one who was interested in the idea and took it in for development.
The first idea was an army of little people
Kotani also revealed that the first idea of their development team was the little characters with googly eyes swarming to fight a monster. He also revealed in the interview that this game was his first project that he created entirely from scratch. The designs for the monsters that were present in the game were also discussed with the French artist, who then approved of the designs and then finalize it for development.
The first idea of four buttons was too complex
The game development of “Patapon” was complex at the start due to the first few ideas they thought of. They thought first up, that they would use all four buttons of the PlayStation Portable, which could command the drums to March, Attack and Defend battle options. They trashed the idea because it was too complex for players and they might have trouble remembering all of them and if it were too simple, it would look boring.
Kotani thought of making the tribe communicate with the players, but without using human language. He was looking at some rhythm action games at that time and he had a hint of an idea about what was to come, but there was something missing.
After a little while, Rolito went to Japan and he gave some suggestions on the naming conventions for the characters.
Kotani took notice of the name Patapon, which he knew automatically was going to be a perfect fit as he could do drumming noises with some of the syllables of the name. After getting the idea, he asked Pyramid to make a prototype that combined all of his ideas and after the final result, he knew this was the one they were going to make.
Check out the "Patapon" Trailer below:
