#wasn't salmon fishing supposed to be the hangman's gambit?

[kaibutsushidousha]

Artbook Data - Design Team Interview

All left now for my artbook translation series are the three big interviews. The finale is approaching. I’ll do design, then development, then writing. Expect them to take even longer than usual, since they are all huge.

Notes:

I have no idea why Komatsuzaki is not being interviewed

Nakao is the main character designer and illustrator for Zanki Zero. Basically their Komatsuzaki.

Interviewees:

Tatsuya Marutani: One of the old school members, being part of the team since DR1′s development. He was DR1′s director, and from DR2 onwards, he has been managing the budget, schedule, etc. as the production manager. 

Satoshi “parori” Kawabara: Like Marutani, a member since DR1. He worked in all games of the series as a scenery designer and in V3 he is the leader of the scenery design team. He also personally made the 3D models for all the buildings.

Ayumi Sugita: Designer for some UI elements, like the title screen and the school badge. The woman behind the perjury mechanic, all new Class Trial minigames and all the replaceable e-Handbook backgrounds.

Ayako Nakao: Worked as an UI designer since DR1′s development. In V3, she handled the Class Trial interfaces, mainly the Nonstop Debates. She’s the one who incorporated the Psychocool vibe to the UI.

How to decipher a complicated design theme? The designers’ battle starts!

Interviewer: We are starting the interview with the design team. Why don’t you start by telling us which parts each of you do?

Tatsuya Marutani: I was DR1′s and I participated in DR2 and DRAE as a production manager. My role in V3 stayed the same. I’m in charge of budgeting and supervising designs, cutscenes, CGs and et cetera.

I: Not to mention being the leader of the design team.

TM: I don’t do anything this hard. I let every branch of the team have its own leader.

I: I see. Next Kouno-san, please.

Satoshi Kawabara: I have been the leader of the scenery design team since DR1. We don’t have a team specialized in building 3D models, so aside from the scenery models, we’re also in charge of making all other 3D models. But someone else is making the characters.

I: So, you make the 3D models for the places and buildings, got it. Next up, Sugita-san, please.

Ayumi Sugita: I joined in DR2 late stages of production and was in charge of making the interfaces for DRAE and DRV3. I created the designs for the title menu, the the e-Handbook menu and few of the Class Trial interfaces.

I: Last but not least, what do you do, Nakao-san?

Ayako Nakao: I did interfaces for DR1 and 2 and this time I was in charge of the Nonstop Debates.

I: Now that we know what everyone do, I want to start this by asking about what a concept all sides of design share in common. The design theme for V3 was “Psychocool”, Kawabara-san can you give us a few words about it?

SK: Not really. Each team branch interpreted “Psychocool” their own way and used their own concept as the basis for their designs. Then we discussed it with the others and reached a final consensus. Psychocool is a word our group made up, so it’s only natural that everyone understands it as something different. So I think I can’t speak for everyone because every team branch would give you different answer.

I: Don’t the design teams communicate with each other to maintain a visual consistency? 

SK: We communicate, of course, but we never reached a concrete image of Psychocool.

I: Yeah, that’s vague.

SK: DR1′s Psychopop theme gave me its fair share of questions, then 2′s Psychotropical made even less sense. Then comes V3 with its Psychocool and I could just think “what the heck am I supposed to do with this?” (laughs). 

AN: In 1 and 2 I just went with my own interpretation and it all turned out ok in the end. I thought the characters and the scenery would show the “psycho” side and for my interfaces I just had to worry about showing the “pop” or “tropical” sides. Back in 2 I even tried to add an ukelele to the interface to increase the tropicality.

I: So you each find your own interpretation and insert it into the design. I’ve heard that the development this time was very chaotic for the design team because the theme was suddenly changed from Psychoamerican to Psychocool.

SK: There were some more beside Psychoamerican. Psychostylish if I recall right?

AN: It went from Psychoamerican to Psychostylish to Psychocool. 

SK: Whatever it were, design directions can’t be decided without a concept keyword, so there work proceeded by each team branch throwing in their design under the most recent theme. 

TM: The work with the scenery always starts with Kawabara messaging me saying “I got the new theme. I have no idea what it means.”. We get some orders from the script writer, like “I want this to feel more cyberpunk than steampunk”, “more green, more nature”, so we take what we get and expand on it. Then, after we get to read the finished script, we adapt what needs to be adapted to it and that’s pretty much it. We don’t let the Psychocool theme restrict us too much on the earlier stages.

I: And how does the interface design proceeds?

AN: The DR1 and 2 interfaces used warm colors like gold and orange. But, since the theme this time was “cool”, I chose colder colors. I think we got an overall more “cool”, more subdued vibe.

The Saishuu Academy grounds’ multiple design concepts.

I: Now I have a few questions about the scenery design. The stage this time is a school inside a dome. How was the scenery design planned around this idea?

SK: Since the plot was planned, it was already decided it would be a space sorrounded by a prison-like wall. But another keyword I received was “spaceship”, so I decided to add some more cyberpunk and futuristic elements by making it into a dome, and then, since the school’s name contained the word “captive”, I covered the dome with a birdcage.

I: Sugawara-san said in his own interview that the birdcage was his idea.

SK: By the way, the birdcage idea was also used for the shrine that leads to the trial grounds. To be honest, after we made the wall into a birdcage, I checked it to see how it looked from the garden. It was so giant that we couldn’t tell it was a birdcage. And so, I made the trial shrine into a smaller birdcage to make everyone notice the bigger birdcage. As a result, entering the trial can be bizarrely described as entering a little birdcage inside a birdcage.

I: Didn’t expect the shrine to have this much of a secret to it. Did you first design the exterior of the buildings and then the interiors?

SK: That’s how it usually goes, but this time we still hadn’t planned how big the school would be, so we didn’t know what we would need to have outside. The sports ground we made early on was never used in the story, so we removed it from the layout, but on the other hand, the more we developed the script, the more new places we needed in the school building. 

TM: The twist of Ki-bo destroying the school in chapter 6 was a last minute decision, so that caught us off guard.

SK: Oh, it did. Good we hadn’t started making a 7th floor back at the time (laughs)

I: Nice you didn’t have to throw an entire floor away (laughs) You said you had to add a lot to the school, so how big it was originally?

SK: At first it only had 3 floors. For the building scenery, I wanted to make it similar to Kibougamine or just a regular traditional public school, while still trying to give the fans a different feel to it.

I: And then you kept adding new floors nonstop. 

SK: Yes. The script for a new chapter said “4th floor” then the next said “5th”. In the end, I had to scale it up to 6 floors. The script gave me some tips saying the 4th floor was “Japanese”, “creepy and scary”, “mythological horror”, so I took my notes and adjusted its image accordingly. Following this notes and adding my own psycho elements, I made the 4th floor and Shinguuji’s lab. 

I: The 4th floor was really the most impressive made. DR:AE had that graveyard stage with a similar taste, but this floor was even scarier.

SK: Having fun with what you’re creating is a tradition in the DanganRonpa scenery team. The 4th floor was about mythological horror, so I could add a direct reference to Village of Eight Gravestones. When something had to add something there, we all tested to make it as scary as we could. I even put some broken Kṣitigarbha statues from pictures I found on the internet. The picture was really good, so I used it as the base for the whole theme.

I: The broken statues did have this impact. With Kodaka-san’s precise theming and your efforts, you managed to make every floor after the 4th one also have a unique tone to them. 

SK: The theme for the 5th floor was much more clear because Kodaka wrote a game’s title on the instructions. (laughs). And also “angels and demons”, if i recall right. Holding my suspictions that the plot would bring up something about duality, I assumed that the 5th floor would be explored when the story was approaching its climax and designed it to have a bigger atmosphere of climatic grandeur. 

I: I see, and finally the 6th floor?

SK: It was decided that the 6th floor, containing Momota’s lab, would be open at the same time as the cyberpunk area outside. Therefore, they got a near-future and spaceish vibe.  By the way, Momota’s lab was initially supposed to be on the 3rd floor. It was going to be a rocket punched through the school’s wall, and inside it would look like a control room. But then the script mentioned a room that you had to climb all the way from the bottom of the school to the top, so I thought I should make the interior of the rocket into a giant staircase, and Momota’s lab came to be as it is today.

I: Now that we’re on the subject, I would like to about the students’ labs. The labs are unique for each student, but what did you have in mind when designing them? The talents?

SK: Believe it or not, for the labs we received barely any instructions. We were left to design them however we wanted. We took from many points from the students’ characterization and designs to solidify the ideas we wanted and sent our own designs. One example I remember is that I received the request of “I want Yumeno’s lab to have a feeling of both real magic and magic tricks” and I had to make all the hard work of finding this balance. The first version I did looked like an illusionist’s warehouse, so I got it had “not enough real magic”. The labs were all like this, taking numerous attempts to get perfect as they are now.

I: Was the process for this similar to the student rooms in DR1 and 2?

SK: The students’ rooms all had the same size, so all had to do is add some accessories inside to differentiate them. This time I had no restrictions about the room’s size, so I didn’t make the mistake of treating them like the standardized bedrooms. For example, for Momota’s lab I thought “make it space-like. A planetarium maybe”, then you go to Gonta’s lab and it’s a bothanical park (laughs). I was trying to think outside of the box as much as I could.

I: How did you think for characters whose concept was difficult to expand. For example, the Super High School Level Survivor Rantarou Amami sounds like a challenge to me...

SK: It was said in the story that Amami’s room was “death game-like”. I had to keep asking myself “what is ‘death game-like’?”. 

TM: Because this game is a death game.

I: It sure is (laughs)

SK: So I based the design on LIAR GAME (a manga about deceiving other in a psychological battle. Has a TV drama and a movie adaptation) and added a more bloody vibe and horror elements, making Amami’s room.

I: Also, I heard from Kodaka-san that Saihara’s lab had 52 books containing all the murder tricks used on the previous DanganRonpas. 

SK: The furniture and items have their places decided by the boss. For every room, I draw my draft only after reading the story’s script, understanding the characteristics of the room and doing all the research I need to design its scenery. I give this draft for the planners to check, and they give me the ok, I can send it to Kodaka. I think the books idea came along somewhere along this back and forth. 

I: I see. Another question about the student bedrooms. Aside from the protagonists (Akamatsu and Saihara), we also see Ouma’s bedroom. It’s filled with random items from the previous cases all over. How did you get that from Ouma’s character quirks?

SK: In the other games’ story, the bedrooms were provided by Monokuma to reflect each student’s talent and character quirks. But here we have the student labs for that, so we didn’t think much about personalizing the bedrooms. For Ouma’s bedroom, I just consulted with the planner in charge of it to make it fulfills all of the conditions it needed to. 

The Saishuu Academy’s gigantic map is fully loaded with its designer’s imagination!

I: One of the new elements of the maps is that they are filled with many breakable objects with Monocoins inside. As the scenery designer, you get choose which objects are breakeable, right?

SK: When I first designed the maps, no objects were breakable. But now that the scenery is more realistic, the charm of the 2.5D effect got weaker, so we decided to include this feature as a way to highlight it. From this point on, I began considering what is slapable in all future drafts, but I have no idea when it was decided that they would have Monocoins.

I: The DanganRonpa series seems to have a lot of those “things that just happened and no one knows how” (laughs). What it difficult to make all this scenery, as you put it, more realistic?

SK: Not more difficult, just more time consuming. Like, before I could just make an object pop out of the background and that was ok because “it’s 2.5D”, but this time I needed a more natural presentation. For example, to make a room before, I had to build its 3D and make it 2.5D. This time, I had to add natural-looking lighting to the 3D room I built and then drop the 2.5D objects there in a way that emphasized this lighting. Lots of new steps were added to the process.

I: So instead of getting harder, you just had a bigger workload because that’s naturally necessary for realism. 

SK: You got it. The hardware changing from the PSP to the PS4/Vita also added to the workload, as those have a better graphics. That’s what lead to the lighting work I just mentioned.

I: I’m looking at the earlies drafts for the scenery design and the tone here feels a lot lighter than in the final version. Was the Saishuu Academy going to be completely different from how it is?

SK: When I drew these earliest draft, we is still hadn’t decided on the direction we were going for. All I had was an instruction: “I want it to look like a portrait in a 3D map”, so I made these designs only to look portrait-ish. Besides, since I didn’t get any proper orders for the school, I just drew two patterns of options for everything.

I: What were the concepts for them?

SK: At first I didn’t what direction to take to make it different from Kibougamine Academy. For the first 3 floors, I took Kibougamine’s basic concept of a prestigious public school with a tangible history and took it even further, resulting in a pompous, almost church-like building. ((upper image in the link above))

I: Gorgeous and luxurious. And the other one?

SK: The other one was more modern university. Universities nowadays have some classrooms with no walls or windows, and that felt very liberating, so I how I thought it would be fun to draw a place like this. ((lower image in the link)) So I drew this draft but it turned we couldn’t make a school this open because with make the murder tricks more difficult to create. I made this concept hoping it wouldn’t be approved. I’m glad my idea was ditched (laughs). 

I: (laughs) Speaking of ditched scenery ideas, any others you want to talk about?

SK: The biggest thing is that in the first draft the wall surrounding the school was going to have an opening with a giant waterfall coming out of it, and a pond below it. We were planning for the waterfall to make a pretty rainbow but one day it was suddenly not there anymore.

I: And how exactly was this waterfall supposed to be used in the story?

SK: Remember that little path going behing the school? It was originally going to be much more unnecessarily long, going through the middle of a mazey forest seperated from the school. However, the forest part would be boring if it was just all green all the time, so someone had the idea to add the waterfall. Ultimately we decided to shorten down that path, so the waterfall was ditched. And then the provisory gym was ditched. 

I: Why was the gym ditched?

SK: The murder trick for chapter 2 needed it. It was merged with the pool area and demanded design changes to accomodate it. That said, I was probably going to have to change it anyways because the old version was based on the not yet made New National Stadium (laughs).

I: (laughs) Scenery designs does have its fair share of parodies and references. Like that statue of that ninja...

SK: The lines in the script also pushed the reference, so I think the scenery team decided to hit it as close to the original as copyright allowed. Being an object provided by Monokuma, we had the liberty to go a little crazy with it, so we went all in with the ninja statue and the stone tablet in front of the pool. 

I: And so, you weren’t forbbiden for neither the statue nor the tablet. 

SK: No, I was forbidden for the ninja statue. As I mentioned on the dev blog, it was originally much more identical to the real deal. Naturally, this would cause copyright issues, so I was forbidden by someone even higher up than Producer Terazawa. By the way, we included quite a few references not only in the maps but in the cutscenes too. I hope you readers replay the story to find all of them.

Making it comfortable and pleasant to play: The feelings incorporated into V3′s interface

I: Alright, now I want to ask about the interface designs. What do you need to discuss before you start working on the UIs?

AN: The game flow (daily life -> investigation -> class trial) never changes, but that doesn’t mean all games should have the same interface. The first step in design is deciding on the base color to fit the theme. Also, for 2 we could make flater designs because the PSP’s resolution was lower, but on the PS4/Vita’s higher resolution, the images would feel empty will if we designed then like we did before. That’s were have our fun thinking about what new effects we should use in the new UI, like for example grunge (the spotted design effect).

SK: The UI never gets done in the first try, does it?

AS: Never. Especially for the non-Trial part. I can’t even count how many we changed it (pained laughter).

AN: It took the longest for us to figure out how to fit 3 characters on the same dialogue. 

AS: The first thing we discussed is how to include this set-up that allows for 3 characters on the same screen. And we finally got the first screen ready to be our template, we built our UI around it until the higher-ups said “No, this feels wrong” and threw it away. Another big problem was V3′s much higher ammount of dialogue UIs. In DR2 it only changed for day and night, but in V3, aside from the timeframe changes, we also have different UIs for the daily life and investigation. 

I: You’re quite the perfectionists about this. So, when you don’t have a clear answer for the interface, what basic principles do you follow?

AN: The only possible principle: trial and error. For example, we once add TV show elements to the Class Trial debate interface. It was idea made considering the endgame twist, but it was forbidden for being “too much”. Our first map interface also had the same TV theme to it, so that was also scrapped along with all other TV-related ideas we had. After that, we started thinking only of “cool” as our design theme. 

I: I see you had a lot of working problems, but overall did you how your new options expanded your creative liberty?

AN: Oh, tell me. As I said before the resolution now is a lot higher. If we tried adding grunge back on the PSP days, every screen would get blurry and ugly. Now everything looks pretty on the screen. Me and Sugita were pretty hyped that we could use the grunge effect now (laughs).

SK: You two did great. Like with all the ideas you added to the Trial debates.

AS: But the first months gave us gestaltzerfall. “What’s an interface”, we asked (laughs).

I: Thinking of DanganRonpa design is harder than for other games?

TM: All titles care about their design. It’s just that DanganRonpa can afford spending a longer time thinking about its designs. There as lot of adding new aspects and taking them back, but other titles are just as hard.

I: And has that ever lead to argue with Kodaka-san about...

TM: All the time.

SK: I think everyone in the team really trusts each other. 

TM: Yeah, because whenever someone in the team has a cool idea they really want to use, we all do everything we can to add it. That’s how we made DanganRonpa 1 and we got a lot of praise from the players for it.

SK: That’s the part that matters. In DR1 we really went beyond what’s reasonable, but since the players loved it, I can’t think we did anything wrong. That’s why I always trying doing the most unreasonable things they ask me.

I: Can you recall any of those unreasonable requests?

SK: V3 was full of those. Changing the colors of the staircase was quite work, for one. After the entire game was pretty much done and ready for release, I got the sudden request saying “I want to add more colors like the were in 1 and 2. Give a crazy color to the staircases”.

AS: Oh, that’s right. When I first played the game, I thought “The staircases were not this color”.

TM: Because of this, we had to redraw a bit of the scenery, some story CGs and Climax Inferences.

I: Even under this conditions, you never say no?

SK: If we can do we want to do it.

TM: But naturally, it’s not easy having to rearrange the schedule and budget.

The Class Trial gimmicks achieved a huge power-up

I: Next up, I want to ask about the Class Trial designs. I was really impressed by the huge power up V3 got when it came to how the words were displayed and moved.

AN: That was the first idea we had to make this game’s presentation’s richer than the previous entries. The planner in charge complained a bit when I said he must come up different movements for every sentence, but I got him to do his best (laughs).

I: The fonts got a lot more varied, too.

AN: At first we did it with only one font, just like in the first two games. After we started decorating the text with flowers and magic circles around the characters, we had the idea to change the fonts as well. So we prepared 3 different fonts, but that was still not enough. After begging our programmer hard enough, we ultimately added 20 new fonts to the game.

I: Lots of new elements were added to the Class Trial, like the Panic Debates, Perjury and the Debate Scrum. How hard it was to introduce those?

AN: We had a lot to take away from the Panic Debate. We built the set up and when we excitedly went to test, it was really hard to display different characters in 3 separate cameras and have words come out of them. We removed a lot from it not to overload the game and had to release this oversimplified version. It was difficult compromise.

I: I see. How about the Perjury mechanic?

AS: I did the Perjury design. I took really long before it got how it is now. I was asked to do something that looked different from everything we had in a Class Trial before, so I had no idea what to do. I desperately searched for hints in the script and the illustrations, until I found my epiphany in that one Ouma sprite where is face turns pitch black. When people lie, something in them change. Ouma is the embodiment of lie in V3, so it figures that his change, this color inversion, is what gave shape to the lie mode.

AN: Oh yeah, I remember the perjury prototype screen was titled “OumaColors” (laughs).

AS: I used’s Ouma’s purple (laughs). And the eyes with “lie” written on it to reflect the character’s hesitant mind was Kouno-san’s idea. It was there to give a feeling of “Everyone is watching you lie!”.

I: Perjury is filled behind-the-scene secrets!

AN: The Debate Scrum doesn’t have any interesting origin story like the Perjury has, but we had some trouble trying to differentiate from the standard Nonstop Debate. We added the part at the end were you have to push the rockets after everyone matched the discussion topics. I don’t know why we settled with rockets, we were just suggested to do something that moves and the rockets were the first idea that came up.

I: One last thing about the Class Trial. In chapter 6, we have a couple unique designs and interfaces. Did you just have this idea when reading the script? Has the story helped you defining these designs?

SK: Everything was decided on the spot when building chapter 6.

AN: Yes. We brought pretty much everyone to discuss this part. Now that you mentioned, I absolutely can’t remember why we made the final Ki-bo Argument Armament in 3D. He was so hard to make. I made all the system to add him in 2D like every other AA character, but then I got told “Drop that for now, Ki-bo might have a different visual from everyone else”. I never expected Ki-bo to be the only one in 3D.

The minigame design were also all pitched with full force!

I: All teams told me in their respective interviews that they faced difficulties with chapter 6. Anyways, our next topic is the minigames and the in-game games. Please tell us why the room with the Monomono Machine looks so African?

SK: The reason is incredibly simple. The initial plan was to make the Monomono Machine more cyberpunk-looking, to match the game’s previous cyberpunk design. But we reconsidered because putting cyberpunk objects in a cyberpunk area is not interesting. So make the pieces in our composition more mismatched, we went with the African imagery. 

AS: A shocking clash of opposites.

TM: But why Africa specifically?

SK: I can’t remember why I chose Africa, but I do remember why I didn’t want the school store to look like a school store. Back in DR1 I made just a normal school store with unexpected products on the shelves, like paper lanterns and Western armor, but I found it funny. This time, I decided to reverse my joke, making a room that looks nothing like a school store and filling the shelves with the most commonplace products. And that how it came to Africa. 

AS: Oh, so that was the reason for Africa. I remember when I was trying to come up with a design for the Monomono Machine. I asked how the store room looked like and you just said “Africa” with no further elaboration. Despite the millions of questions in my head, I still designed all the wallpapers for the Monomono Machine keeping the African motif (laughs). 

SK: Sorry for designing the school store without consulting. I didn’t even think about the Monomono Machine...

AS: You don’t need to apologize, it was fun to design!

I: So, about the minigames, was that whole setup where you can play all the Class Trial minigames (redesign) at the Casino planned from the start?

AN: Yes. Some of the Trial minigames were hard, so we made the Casino as place where you could practice them in a fun way. The redesign were made to create a more fun atmosphere, since keeping the same designs would make the player feel like they are still playing the Class Trial.

I: I see. And then you added the Casino-originals: the Monomono Slots and the Salmon Fishing.

AN: We just wanted to make one new game for the Casino. The jackpot animation for the Monomono Slots was entirely handdrawn, so I’m glad it got okayed. Also, please notice that the frame for the Salmon Fish is decorated with roe. 

I: That’s right! There’s roe in the frames.

AN: In the beta version we had an animation for the eggs hatching when you beat the game. But we couldn’t include it in the final version, so I thought people wouldn’t notice the eggs, hence why I’m raising this appeal for them. 

I: More fans to the roe. Also, still talking about the Casino, I heard from the planning team that the e-Handbook wallpapers available as prizes there were quite popular with the fans.

AS: Making that many was worth the effort. At first we were only going to have 20 of them, considering “16 students + α”, but I was requested to make more of them because the Casino didn’t have enough prizes, so by the end of it, there were 40 Handbook wallpapers in total.

I: Double the original plan. Was it hard to make this many new patterns?

AS: It was fun (laughs). The wallpapers are prizes you have to buy from the Casino, so I wanted let everyone be happy with the one they picked. I started by making a pink one because Akamatsu was a girl and a blue one because Saihara was a boy, then I started making new ones with colors tied to the character quirks of the rest of the cast, considering both their design colors and some keywords. Then I made the Dangan Salmon Team and the Love Hotel ones borrowing elements from those designs. Same with the DR1, 2 and AE ones. Then the more original ones with my own original material. I get filled with emotion when reading tweets of people enjoying their wallpaper of their favorite character.

I: That’s the good part of being a creator. Anything you else want to say about the Casino room?

SK: A casino and a love hotel are not installations you should have at a school, so they off in the academy’s grounds. So, I made them not visible in the area where you can see the school building.

I: It was a trick to preserve the beauty of the school grounds, huh. Now, tell me which extra lenghts did you have to go to make the Death Road of Despair and the program world from chapter 4.

AN: The interface made the assets for the DRoD. Since I was told we would have a 2D sidescroller, I prepared the controllable chibi characters. Since this is a bonus mode, it was possible to just use the 8bit sprites we already had, but I decided it was better to make the sprites I did since those are actually facing the right side.

AS: We also had to make running and jumping sprites for 16 characters. It was very time-consuming. 

TM: Making all of this for 16 is impressive. It’s a strange amount of effort for a minigame that ends so fast (laughs). 

I: And how long did the chibi charas in the virtual world take to make?

TM: Those didn’t take as much effort because they were a lot less varied, both in movement patterns and in number of characters. However, the program world is practically a whole different game, so it took a lot of time to balance the size of the world and the movement speed. 

SK: The sceneries in the program world were partially made in 3D. We needed to use special test cameras to check everything regarding the characters’ movement speeds and scenery gimmicks. Only after all of that is done that I can start drawing.

I: Oh, remembered the program world had unique text boxes. 

AS: We changed the entire interface, to emphazise that that was a different world. Aside from the text box, we changed the BGM name visualizer and change the movement format from omnidirectional to vertical and horizontal only. Also, you know how the characters change expressions during conversations? We drew all of those expressions ourselves. I added the sweatdrops and effects because I wanted the characters to stay expressive even inside the program.

TM: It was costly but the development was so fun I think it was worth the price. As you would expect, there was heavy discussion about the Death Road of Despair, since we would need to make way too many new assets for such minor parts of the story and I’m not sure I agree (laughs). But this, the setting of the entirety of chapter 4, is much more clearly worth its price.

What are the interface and menu easter eggs layed by the design team!?

I:Time for the final question: anything to say about secrets or easter eggs you all put into the game, like the salmon roe Sugita mentioned earlier?

SK: Half of the images of real people in chapter 6 are people from our firm. We even included some people who appear in public often, like Terazawa-san and Sasaki. Have fun looking for them. 

AN: I’m pretty sure we also included one person wearing a Monokuma head in there.

I: But there are foreigners in those pictures too, no?

SK: The plot says the whole world is watching, so it would be weird if we only had pictures of Asian people. So we use stock pictures for half of them. All the foreigner and elders there were stock pictures. We also included a few family members of the staff in charge of editing said stock pics. 

I: I see. Anything else?

AS: Remember how characters appear in the background of the gallery menus? There are some rules to which characters appear. For example, the Saihara without the hat won’t appear before you beat chapter 1. Also, one character in particular doesn’t appear before you complete the story. I would love if you checked who it is for yourself. Then there’s the easter egg on the title menu.

I: What did you hide there?

AS: There’s a lot of objects on top of the building on the title menu. Every time you beat a chapter, a new object related to the chapter in question gets added. I think a lot of people don’t go back to the title menu that often, so when they realized, the place is already packed with stuff. 

TM: I didn’t go back to title menu before I finished the game.

I: That’s what I call hidden content. Now, one message to the fans, please.

TM: I think this was better than DR1 and DR2, both in plot, volume and pacing. And I can proudly brag that this is the entry that best shows what DanganRonpa is about. I believe you’ll discover many new by playing the game from the start after reading this book, so I would love if you replayed it.

SK: In my many years in the gaming industry, I very often thought about how I live wanting to make something that moves someone’s heart. This game said every word it had to say, so I strongly a decent amount of hearts were moved by it. I hope V3 is a game that leaves lasting marks on the players’ hearts, be them from positive emotions or from negative.

AS: Probably very few people pay attention to a game’s interface. But I am interested in interfaces from a professional standpoint, so once I played DR1 I realized that this was the kind of interface I wanted to make and I started dreaming of working on the DanganRonpa series. The dream came true in DR2 and in V3 I was left in charge of many of the interfaces. I’m extremely glad it happened, but I gotta say I faced a fair amounts of challenges. It was a great experience. I thought the hardest I could to make this interfaces, so please pay attention while you search the easter eggs in the game.

AN: I can say with confidence that V3 is the culmination of everything our dear series represents. It was the first time we could develop a game of the series on the PS4 and we could make more detailed interfaces because of it. Explore every nook and cranny of it.