海外インディ開発者インタビュー～「OPUS: 星歌の響き」～

1.What is the most difficult part of the development for OPUS:Echo of Starsong and how do you overcome it?
The world of OPUS: Echo of Starsong is the first of its kind, built completely from the ground up, so the most difficult part for us was to get everyone in the development team on the same page in regards to what the world actually looked like.
To overcome this, we created a full internal wiki that documented every detail of the world, including history, culture, and even factions. This wiki ended up reaching 100k words, with over 100 pages in total.

But even that wasn’t enough, because nobody wanted to read a massive wiki. So to make all the information more accessible for the team, we drew storyboards of the entire game, and combined them with music and concept drawings to drill the imagery into everyone’s heads. Only then did the team reach a shared understanding of what story and setting we were aiming for with this game.

2.How did you promote OPUS:Echo of Starsong before release?
Since we don’t have a publisher for this game, we pretty much relied on ourselves for all the free and basic stuff, like hyping up our community on social media, joining game events, and emailing as many media outlets as we could.

To be honest though, scheduling our marketing campaign has been a big challenge. Echo of Starsong is an extremely difficult game to translate, and we spent a lot of time and resources to get it right in each language. So by the time it was done, we were very close to the release date, and had to push hard to get people excited before launch, while leaving enough room between announcements so they don’t get tired of the bombardment. It was tough.

But I think the extra work was worth it. Since launch, players in Japan have compared Echo of Starsong to amazing works such as “To The Moon” and “Your Name”, providing us with excellent marketing material to reach more players through the passion of our community.

3.How did you fund budget or overcome any budget difficulties for your first game of OPUS Series?
We used the money we made from our debut game “Hyper Square” to fund the first OPUS. Before that, we actually sold a game concept to a big company and used it to kick start our studio.

4.What are your main deciding factors when choosing language for localization of OPUS:Echo of Starsong?
Because Echo of Starsong is such a dense, narrative-driven game, we weren’t able to simply outsource the localization. With a lot of the material deeply rooted in Chinese mythology and its way of thinking, we pretty much had be directly involved in the process and communicate with our translators on a weekly basis, so ease of communication was a big factor.

In Asia, Japanese and Simplified Chinese were easily our top picks due to language and cultural proximity, especially since our previous game OPUS: Rocket of Whispers (OPUS 魂の架け橋) was awarded a Platinum Hall of Fame (白金殿堂入り) by Weekly Famitsu, which helped us establish a good deal of recognition in the region.

Western cultures, on the other hand, are much less familiar with concepts of Fend-Sui(風水), so we had to spend more time figuring out how to get the ideas across. For example, one of the key locations in the game, “黑龍”, literally means “Black Dragon”. While this isn’t a particularly bad name, it doesn’t evoke the kind of imagery we had in mind, so instead we ended up with “Banshee”. These kinds of cultural differences are a constant challenge during the process, so when it comes to localization, we try to pick languages that we’re familiar with to ensure a decent level of quality.

5.Do you have any advice for other indie game creators?
Having spent years to grow from 2 to 20 members, one thing we learned is that making a good game is only half the challenge. Knowing how to sell it is usually what determines whether your game succeeds.

For fresh game devs, my first advice is to launch your game as quickly as possible. Don’t try to tackle anything big. Get it out fast to experience the market, so when you fail, you’re in a better position to get back on your feet. If you spend 3, 4 years of your life on something too large and it flops, the loss and defeat could be too much to bear, and your first game might end up being your last.

My second advice is to make something that’s stream-friendly. Gaming is a saturated market, and the amount of attention you’ll get from media and influencers is a scarcity. If you don’t have an established presence, getting them to spend time on your game is going to be an uphill battle. For the same amount of time, they could be playing any AAA title with a much larger audience. So if your game doesn’t bring in viewers, they really have no reason to play it, and you’ll be struggling to gain attention.

And finally, I think it’s important to have fun. Despite everything I’ve just said, I want my fellow devs to know that sometimes the problem really isn’t a lack of talent or hard work. It could be just a matter of luck, or lack of experience in selling games. Creating games out of love for the medium and a desire to share that love is a beautiful thing. So even though the market may seem cruel and competitive, please don’t forget the feeling that urged you to start making games, because one day it just might be the key to your success.