-Niinou's relationship with videogames started with buying a Famicom and falling in love with pixel art, leading the 7~8 years old Niinou to constantly be reproducing the 8-bit sprites with color pencils on graph paper.
-Later, when he was 10, he started learning about game programming by cluelessly playing around with a
pocket computer until he managed to get something done.
-His first game there was a completely gimmickless dice game. Just two players taking turns using a random number generator to advance squares until one reaches the goal first. Niinou then went to show off his proud accomplishment to his computer-savvy teacher and got a "I don't get what's so fun about this" in return.
-After that, he started checking what the dice games available in the market were like and felt forced to admit his game was shit, as real dice games were a lot more engaging with all the different stuff happening according to the squares you land on.
-His first real job was as a graphic designer at Pax Softnica, doing the sprite work for all 3 Hamtaro games on the Game Boy Color.
-Although he loved his job making sprites, he had his ambitions to make his own games where he had full creative control, which lead to Atlus eventually accepting his first game project, Trauma Center: Under the Knife, and later his most successful work, Etrian Oddyssey.
-Niinou's main design focus is making games the players never get tired of playing. More subdued games you can't stop playing over games you play a lot and get quickly burned out.
-Another highly valued factor is making the game experience equal parts challenging and rewarding.
-As mentioned in the other interview, before Fate/EXTRA, Niinou's first contact with Type-Moon was asking to make a Tsukihime game with them.
-Since his Atlus era, Niinou has been sending hundreds of e-mails asking to work with Type-Moon on a game and kept getting the "Our company is too busy with many other projects" response, but eventually he changed his mindset to "If I show them an interesting idea, they'll want to take it", so he presented Fate/EXTRA and got what he wanted.
-Niinou recommends other upcoming game creator to follow his attitude of insistently approaching companies until you managed to get the chance to make the game you want to make.
-Niinou then went to Square Enix, where he was highly successful with Final Fantasy XIV and the 2 Dragon Quest Builders games, but dropped all that to make Studio BB.
-Square Enix was a large company and those large company circumstances made it impossible for Niinou to develop the DQB games as fast as he wanted, so he wanted the next project to be something he could fully control the pacing of progress.
-He's the kind of guy who only feels motivated to do something when it's challenging, and somewhere along the current challenge he always starts thinking about the next challenge, because life is short and there're just so many games you can make.
-As mentioned in the other interview, Niinou proposed to make a Type-Moon game with Square, but Square answered "Ok but not now", so Niinou left them and opened his own studio to work for Type-Moon now.
-Niinou is actually really happy to leave Square Enix because their work environment was too good and he wants the dev process to be awful and challenging, as mentioned above.
-Studio BB is a team of 7 people with a lot they wanted to do but were denied by the industry's constraints, so Niinou is providing a paradise where they can do the games they want the way they want. And this paradise Niinou is talking about is the actual physical studio office they now can't go to because Covid.
-Takenouchi (the art director)'s main priority is making the scenery not look stupid. He's a strong believer that designing for a fantasy setting should never mean the buildings are allowed to look impractical for that series' ruleset. Never be bizarre just for the sake of being bizarre, basically. Create something that makes sense for the setting. Meanwhile, Hibara, the art designer (mainly character designer) is the bigger Type-Moon enthusiast and places the main priority on how faithful everything is to Type-Moon's style.
-Niinou talks about how the game development process is about first finding out what you want to make, then studying if it's possible, then running a lot of tests to see if you can really do it in full, and only then you start making it. Fate/EXTRA being announced means it already overcame these first 3 very time consuming steps and everything is putting their efforts into it with full confidence that they can do it.
-Basically, what Niinou is trying to say with this is that Record will be out Soon
TM
Originally Posted by Inuhanyou
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