Here is the translation of an interview we did few weeks ago about our circle and our future projects.
We also added some informations for the foreign players.
What is the difference between NRF and Frontier Aja?
Frontier Aja is a independant game circle created by some members of the “BigBangBeat” team.
But Frontier Aja and NRF are now two completely separated game circles.
After the release of BigBangBeat, there was some differences of point of view in the team and in short, the person in charge of the project, time after time, decided to stop the support to the users.
Some other members of NRF refused to give up their project and finally created “Frontier Aja” in 2007 to continue providing support and patches.
Unfortunately, at this time, the team was missing a programmer and the modifications in the patches was not enough to satisfy the demands of the users. Once again, we have to apologize for the difficulties we had at this time to fix and improve the quality of BigBangBeat.
Why did you decide to not create a new fighting game?
Frontier Aja does not have the license of the game engine created by NRF for BigBangBeat. We don’t have a game engine for fighting games. Creating an engine for fighting game is difficult, long and tricky. It was impossible for us to release a fighting game as a first game. Since we also wanted to include new features, such as netplay, we decided to postpone the development of BBB2 and to start with an Action Game with horizontal scrolling. After that, with the new engine, we will be more ready to develop fighting games.
People may think that Koumajou Densetsu is just a project to train us for our next projects. But Koumajou Densetsu is not just training for us, it’s also a very interresting project in an other genre we wanted to try.
Why did you decide to create a game based on Touhou?
When I first saw the illustrations of Vampire Killer on PIVIX, I thought “this is it!”.
And since there are several fans of the Touhou series in the team, it was an easy decision. ^^
What is the differences between Koumajou Densetsu and the other Touhou games.
The Touhou games are usually shooting games.
This is of course different from an action game.
You just have to take a look to some screenshots and you will understand. ^^
We don’t really know the other games based on Touhou universe.
Usually when a company uses a license, the success of the game may come from the license.
But using the characters of Touhou is not enough to make a game interresting.
We really wanted to create a good game, even for the players who never played the Touhou games before.
It looks like a copy of Castlevania…
Yeah, that’s right. Who used some basics of the classic Castlevania but it’s also different. For example you can fly like in a shooting game.
Just try to play and you will see the difference.
How many people worked on the project and how long did it take?
Frontier Aja is a small cercle and so, we have to work hard.
Since it’s our first action game, it’s difficult for us to know if it took long or not. But we actually think the development was quite short (around 3 months). For a 3 months project, we personaly think that the result is a miracle. ^^
Doujin games are not well known in foreign countries. What do you think about that?
In Japan the doujin game are really known as an other genre of games, but unfortunately, foreigners do not seem to care about it.
Why did you decide to communicate with foreigners about your game?
Since the time of BigBangBeat, we always wanted to talk about our games with foreigners.
It’s fantastic to think that someone, somewhere in the world is maybe playing our game.
We also notice that a lot of person from foreign countries were visiting our homepage.
But so far, we were not able to communicate in foreign languages.
We are realizing one of our dreams and from now on, we really want to localize all our games.
Can you tell us more about BBB2?
As I explained above, the development of BBB2 is something very difficult and we need more time. We really want BBB2 to be a success.
We will do our best to produce this game and we are counting on your support!
How can the players from overseas buy your game?
Our game has been released in Japan the 15 august. We contacted different shops on internet (Himeya and Paletweb for example), to be sure they will have enough stock. We are also thinking about opening a shop on ebay.
A message for the foreign players?
First, we really want to thank you for playing our games. We really want to allow the foreign players to play in an easy way our games. Compare to the Japanese players, people from overseas are usually more enthusiastics and that’s a great motivation for us.
We are working hard and without external helps to communicate with foreign players.
All the communications are managed internally which is very rare for a doujin game.
We sincerely want you to appreciate the game in its integrality.
That’s the reason why, we officialy announce the release of a translation patch for Koumajou Densetsu in September.
The patch will allow the user to switch the languages between Japanese, English and French.
We sincerely hope you will enjoy the game and we want to make the doujin games more known overseas.
Once again, thank you for your support, and enjoy the game!
**-Frontier Aja- **