With Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club being Nintendo’s big August release for this year, Nintendo has opted to make Emio – The Smiling Man their next covered game, as part of their “Ask the Developer” interview series. Across three chapters, many questions were asked of Producer, Yoshio Sakamoto and Assistant Producer, Kaori Miyachi.
When talking about the logic of Emio – The Smiling Man, they gave the following responses:
Emio Devs on the Logic of Emio – The Smiling Man:
Yoshio Sakamoto: Even when writing the plot, I try to develop story events while keeping in mind how exactly they’ll be expressed. Once the storyline was set, the next step was to buy a type of wooden doll used for drawing and put it in different poses so that I could create an animatic, or animated storyboard, using various images as backgrounds. Although I’m an art college graduate, I can’t actually draw… So it took a lot of effort, but that’s how I conveyed what I had in mind.
Kaori Miyachi: I was very grateful to Sakamoto-san for showing us the image he had in his mind in a way that we could understand at a glance. I could immediately grasp what he wanted to convey.
Yoshio Sakamoto: The first essential step is to create what we call the “logic”, in other words, the gameplay mechanism that makes the story work as a game.
Kaori Miyachi: We used spreadsheet software. Using multiple spreadsheets, we organised things like which background is displayed in each scene, which music is playing at any given moment, and which scene to jump to if certain conditions are met.
Yoshio Sakamoto: We also used those spreadsheets to manage gameplay progression. Then, we loaded them into a tool like this and ran it. Building the logic so that nothing would break was…a painstaking task. (Laughs)
Kaori Miyachi: Even a slight error in the file could send the story to completely the wrong place, and sometimes, I was left wondering where I’d made a mistake.
Yoshio Sakamoto: During the development of Famicom Detective Club PART II: The Girl Who Stands Behind for Super Famicom, I used different tools and built all the logic myself. This time, I had Miyachi-san go through the logic with a fine-tooth comb and then made corrections.
Kaori Miyachi: Sakamoto-san was excited to show me what he’d made, smugly declaring, “I’m the only one who can create the logic for this series – check this out!”. But when I actually tried it, it wasn’t much fun. (Laughs)
Of course, the logic was well-organised, so the story made sense. But I felt that it was lacking a sense of accomplishment. As I was pondering how to break the news to Sakamoto-san, he told me, “You can be honest”. So I gave it to him straight, “It wasn’t much fun”.
Yoshio Sakamoto: I was flabbergasted. (Laughs) It’s been a habit of mine, since my days of working on the logic single-handedly, not to make it too easy to solve. So I end up making it too difficult. But then I realised that it’s not much fun if you can’t solve it. I want players to feel a sense of achievement when they solve a puzzle, but I shouldn’t make it so difficult that they can’t begin to imagine how to solve it. It was a real challenge to maintain just the right balance throughout the game.
Also, the previous Famicom Detective Club games only used text and had no voice acting. So, if I was worried that players wouldn’t understand something because certain words were missing, I could just add them in and change the logic at the last minute. But for this game, the voice recording was done early on, so we couldn’t make late changes or additions. We had to do quite a bit of planning in advance.
For the full interview, why not click here to check out Ask the Developer Vol. 12, Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club – Chapter 3.
Ask the Developer | Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club (Participating Developers)
- Yoshio Sakamoto | Producer
- Kaori Miyachi | Assistant Producer
