With the Bizenghast Adventure Game finally being released this month, I thought it'd be fun to offer a peek behind the curtain to show what all went into the game's production. Enjoy!
In the beginning:So, a couple of years ago, I was working a menial job in a bookstore (in addition to doing music and game design). I was super depressed at the time because I hated the job, but this is one of those situations where something cool came out of something crappy. One day, while vacuuming the floor in the back of the store, I came across Bizenghast Volume I. I'm really not much of a manga reader, but I am a connoisseur of all things creepy and gothic. The cover illustration (which shows Dinah with a violin for a body) really stood out among the other stuff on the shelf. I remember paging through it and thinking "Wow . . . this is beautiful, dark, and completely insane." A few weeks later I used my employee discount to buy the manga and took it home for a read. Even though I thought the writing was a little iffy in the first volume, I was blown away by the Harry Clarke-esque artwork and the coolness of the premise. Cassie (my wife) read and liked it too. Later we moved, and at some point I picked up volume 2. Around that same time, I was kicking around the idea of making an anime-influenced horror game called
Dirge Trigger. One day while I was developing the idea, I pulled out Bizenghast to see if I could harvest some ideas from it. I was immediately reminded of how cool the series was and a thought suddenly struck me . . . what if I made a game
about Bizenghast. It had exactly the aesthetic that I was going for. Now, at this point I had never done any licensed games and had no idea how one would go about acquiring the rights for something like this. So, I tracked down Ms. LeGrow's email address and sent a proposal. I did this completely on a whim, never expecting to hear anything back from her. To my utter surprise, she got back to me a couple of weeks later and referred me to her editor (hey Lillian!), who then referred me to Tokyopop's licensing person (hey Amanda!). After a swirl of emails and phone-calls, we had a licensing agreement worked out.
Early ConceptsAnd then . . . the terror set in . . . "Holy Crap! Now I actually have to make this thing . . . and it has to stand up to the scrutiny of hardcore fans . . ." I began to frantically jot down some basic ideas for the game. I knew that I wanted it to be simple and accessible. I knew that a lot of Bizenghast fans would only be passingly familiar with the concept of role-playing.
My original concepts for the game were, well . . . bad. The game was originally going to be a competitive card game (with role-playing elements). It was silly. Then, I was going to use my 3fold rules-system for the game. This was a better idea, but it still felt kind of half-assed. I needed something more robust. If I was going to do this right, I would have to create a whole new game system from scratch.
During this time I was approached to work on another licensed game (
Urchin), which had a much shorter time-table to work with (since it was being released alongside a film), so I put the Bizenghast project on the back-burner for a while. The whole time, I worried that I wouldn't be able to come up with anything cool for Bizenghast and I would miss the opportunity of using such a great license.
An Epiphany . . .The whole time that I was working on Urchin and trying to figure out Bizenghast, I was developing another game based on an in-house sci-fi setting (which eventually became known as
Empire of Dust). I was quite enamored with the rules that I had come up with for
EoD, so after much thought I decided to use these rules for Bizenghast too (as well as a bunch of future games). So, the
EoD rule-set became known as
Epiphany Engine.
I knew that I wanted the Bizenghast game to be accessible to new players, so I began the process of filtering the rules down to their most basic level. Once that was done, I began the task of adapting everything I knew about the Bizenghast universe into the rules of the game. By this time, the 3rd volume the manga had come out and revealed that there are many guilds like the Bizenghast guild all over the world. This gave me the premise I needed to base the game on.
Writing, Editing, and LayoutThe Bizenghast Adventure Game was 3 hand-written legal pads before being typed up. The writing process took about a month and a half. I did most of the writing work in various restaurants (COFFEE) and at the local library. I have an actual office downstairs . . . but it's mind-numbingly cold down there in the winter, so I abandoned it for my cozy red couch.
The whole time that I was working on the manuscript, Ms. LeGrow and I traded emails about various details of the Bizenghast universe. I knew that the hardcore fans would be looking for exclusive content, so I got as many details as I could. Actually, at one point I had to take a section out of the manuscript because it would have given too much information away about the upcoming story-arc (which, I'll say, is really freakin' cool).
Next came editing and layout. I sent the manuscript off to my good friend
Daniel Bayn for editing. Once it came back, I dove into laying out the book.
For layout, I dig the couch, cause I can have DVDs playing in the background (for this project it was lots of
Ghosthunters and "Making of" featurettes).
My "office" during the layout phase.
I use Adobe InDesign CS3 for layout.
Layout can be . . . frustrating.The actual manga was INDISPENSIBLE for doing layout. See, all of the art from the comics was compressed and archived so that my hardrive didn't explode, so I used the manga to find the art that I needed and then dug into the archive to find it. Each piece of art was cropped in photoshop before being saved and ported over to InDesign.
I like to have lots of inspirational material nearby when I work. In this case I had Palladium's original TMNT game (which has a lot of interesting parallels to the Bizenghast project) and Luke Crane's
Burning Empires and
The Blossoms are Falling. I make up for my inexperience as a layout artist by stealing ideas from people who know what they're doing.
PublicationSo, as you may have noticed we had quite a delay with getting the game out the door. It was originally slated as to be released in February, but ended being released in June. I really underestimated the amount of time that it would take to work out all of the licensing issues. At the time I was working on finishing the game KNRPG was pretty much a one-man operation, and trying to coordinate samples from the upcoming Bizenghast novels, licensing issues, and advertising were a whole bunch for one person to handle (I'm not complaining, by the way, I LOVE being very busy . . . I get antsy if I'm not doing 50 things at once). In addition to all that, Cassie and I had our first child, Dade, in February and most of my energy mysteriously vanished. It was definitely difficult, and I'm sorry that the fans had to wait so long, but in the end I'm very pleased with the result.
In Retrospect . . .This has been an awesome project. M. Alice LeGrow and every single person I dealt with at Tokyopop were fantastic to work with. I learned
a lot about licensing (which we we're already looking at doing more of) and I feel like I finally hit my stride as a game-designer. The game is exactly the type of game that I would want to play . . . I figure if I can accomplish that, a few other people may want to play it too.
And now . . . back to the salt mines. I've still got a lot of work to polish
Empire of Dust for Gen Con. More soon!
Hey everybody,
