The celebrate the Japanese launch of the game this week, the staff for Gravity Daze (Gravity Rush in the US) gave the media a behind the scenes look at the development of the game.
Dengeki Online put an article up 2 days ago: http://news.dengeki.com/elem/000/000/454/454975/
Here is a look at the original proposal for the game:
I cannot really make out from the photo the exact date the proposal is dated (it's either April 2008 or Jan 2009), but it was proposed by Toyama as a new internal project. The game, known at that point as Gravite, was to be a PS3 "Gravity Action" game for retail. It was targeted at core users, and would support additional episodes delivered as DLC.
Throughout 2009 and 2010, Toyama continued to develop the Gravite idea as a PS3 game with his team. The first concept video they prepared for internal presentation is dated Jan 2009:
A year later, the team put together a game walk through and image board demonstration:
They also shared pre-production materials showcasing the tons of character design changes and evolutions the game went through from the early PS3 stages to the eventual Vita game:
So while this is all very interesting to fans of the game and Sony Japan studios, it also brings up a very interesting question about Sony's Japanese development environment. The last game Toyama shipped was Siren Blood Curse for the PS3 in 2008.
It is now 4 years later, and now we learned that he wasn't totally sitting on his ass doing nothing. Right after shipping Blood Curse, he moved on to making a PS3 action game. But somehow, instead of the game coming out on the PS3 in 2010 like a normal game would, somehow Sony lets the entire team and the team lead spend over 3 years on a relatively small scale new IP.
There's probably something seriously wrong here!
Dengeki Online put an article up 2 days ago: http://news.dengeki.com/elem/000/000/454/454975/
Here is a look at the original proposal for the game:
I cannot really make out from the photo the exact date the proposal is dated (it's either April 2008 or Jan 2009), but it was proposed by Toyama as a new internal project. The game, known at that point as Gravite, was to be a PS3 "Gravity Action" game for retail. It was targeted at core users, and would support additional episodes delivered as DLC.
Throughout 2009 and 2010, Toyama continued to develop the Gravite idea as a PS3 game with his team. The first concept video they prepared for internal presentation is dated Jan 2009:
A year later, the team put together a game walk through and image board demonstration:
They also shared pre-production materials showcasing the tons of character design changes and evolutions the game went through from the early PS3 stages to the eventual Vita game:
So while this is all very interesting to fans of the game and Sony Japan studios, it also brings up a very interesting question about Sony's Japanese development environment. The last game Toyama shipped was Siren Blood Curse for the PS3 in 2008.
It is now 4 years later, and now we learned that he wasn't totally sitting on his ass doing nothing. Right after shipping Blood Curse, he moved on to making a PS3 action game. But somehow, instead of the game coming out on the PS3 in 2010 like a normal game would, somehow Sony lets the entire team and the team lead spend over 3 years on a relatively small scale new IP.
There's probably something seriously wrong here!
