Ishikawa’s method
Ishikawa’s workflow starts with verifying what the producer and director want to achieve and to what audience. Next, she studies how long the game will be, the size of the team, and roughly how many assets they can produce. Next is the project theme, which in CCC’s case was “Sakura Everywhere”. From there she decides how far she can delve into the themes within the assessed condition. She sees characters and worldbuilding as tools to reach the themes.
Nasu’s method
Depends on the medium. For novels, he writes one sentence and then builds everything for the goal of delivering this one sentence. This only works because novel writing is a solo work. Game-making is antithetical to solo work. For VNs, he creates the characters and world together; crafts notes listing the characters, worldbuilding elements, and the theme they ultimately try to achieve; and then fleshes it out from there. Also, games take years to make, so he needs to include something that sells. For example, his idea for making Tsukihime sell was to have the strongest character, and that’s how he settled on Arcueid as the main heroine. Meanwhile, Takeuchi’s selling idea was “maids maids maids!”. Besides, due to Tsukihime’s genre, he had decided on how to make the player fall in love with the heroines first before he could think about the story’s overarching themes and each heroine’s themes.
Lastly FGO. Nasu believes the most important element of an RPG is traveling across a world until you ultimately watch that world end. That was the goal for FGO but the constraint of the mobile genre is that every month a banner character that wasn’t in the initial plan gets dropped on them and they need to write a story for this banner character. And then there’s the main story character. The writer gets to choose half of the lineup on this one. For example, Nasu commissioned two Latin American gods for Nahui Mictlan because of the South American setting. Characters are decided roughly 2 years before their playable release, with the process of writing their profiles, asking the illustrator to design them, and then making the battle sprite taking a whole year. Every year, they settle on how many men or women, how many good guys and bad guys they want to be released that year, form the lineup, and from there the writers decide on which characters each of them want to work on. With the roster distributed, they make each character’s base lore, with frequent doses of “Hey, I think I can use your character in my chapter”.
Mobile game writing requires improvisation skills above all. Situations, including events, will change your initial plans for the main story and its themes, but you need to do what you can to keep everything from going off the rails.
Niinou’s method
Niinou is a director rather than a writer, but his projects include mini-summaries of the plot. His first question at work is “What do people want to play?”. He composes his pitches to be as consistent as possible on this element, and thanks to this approach, he rarely ever got his project refused. Etrian Odyssey was made from the idea that a game where you draw a map on graph paper with a DS stylus would sell like water, and DQ Builders came from the wish to play a sandbox RPG with a proper plot. Thinking about what people want to play is easier than it sounds because “people” don’t have to be a large number. A lot of people ask him to review their projects and most of the time it’s high-quality games that lack a draw that makes people want them. If no one at the presentation is saying “I like this project!”, approving it does more harm than good. If you can’t convince others that your idea is interesting, that idea needs more time in the oven.
His project documents also add visual flair to be convincing. The pitch for Last Ranker, for example, ended on a collage of epic manga scenes and a message reading “Dedicated to the adults who never stopped loving these kinds of scenes growing up”.