For our character designs, we knew that the game would eventually be released on the extremely capable PLAYSTATION 3 hardware, so we felt confident in adding a great deal of detail to our models. For example, if you take a look at our enemy soldier designs, you’ll notice that they wear a green radio-type device on their shoulder. As the game features insect-like biological weapons called Terror-Bites, these are devices that emit a pulse that deters these creatures, ensuring that they are not attacked by accident. When enemies unleash the Terror Bites, you’ll notice that this green device blinks and emits a low buzzing sound. This is a pretty minor detail, but there are a lot of these touches throughout the game. Again, as we were confident in the PLAYSTATION 3 to recreate the arcade experience, we put as much care as possible into designing our characters and game world.

As soon as the Arcade version of Time Crisis 4 was completed, we started development of the PLAYSTATION 3 version. Since we already had our graphics in high-res, it was a relatively simple process for us to get the arcade stages up and running smoothly on the PS3 hardware.

Our team hadn’t created any FPS stages prior to this point, so it was a fun challenge for us to try and meet our goal of implementing control via the Guncon3. We were always concerned with giving the player full movement over the character while also putting them in the fun shooting scenarios that the arcade game is known for. As you can see in the image below, our FPS stages are much larger than our arcade stages. On the left is the game’s first arcade stage, with the first FPS stage to the right. I think players will be surprised by how substantial our FPS mode actually is.

We’re now working the European version of the game, but can feel a sense of relief with the game shipping to stores this week in North America. For the Japanese and Asian versions, there are still a few details to finalize, such as packaging. In the photo below, I am comparing the final Japanese packaging on the left to the Asian version on the right. I’m always concerned with selecting the right type of packaging for each region, so I take this step very seriously. You can also see the final US packaging in the below image – it’s very different from the packaging for our other regions.

Our team put everything we had into making Time Crisis 4 as good as it can possibly be. I’d like to thank you all for reading my blog postings, and hope you found them informative. The game will be hitting stores this week, so I hope you enjoy it!

A lot of people were wondering how the game will work for left-handed players, or if it will even work at all. I’d like to put these concerns to rest by saying that we went through a lot of prototypes and testing with left-handed players, and the setup we have now works equally well no matter your preference. We understand that there are a lot of left-handed players, so you can take my word for it that we took this issue to heart when designing the Guncon 3.

There were also a lot of questions asking about the color of the Guncon 3 in the US (bright orange) as opposed to the black version being released in Japan. In the US and certain parts of Europe, the government dictates that all input devices and toys modeled after guns look significantly different than real guns. I’m sure you’ll see these same garish colors in a lot of toys and other gun-type peripherals, so we really don’t have any control over the matter in this regard.

Finally, I noticed a lot of questions about the shooting accuracy with our new setup, which uses two sensors and allows users to play on any type of television. The Guncon 3 is extremely accurate as a function of both our hardware and software. On the hardware side, the lens of the gun was designed by a company that makes precision lenses used in cameras and scanners that can minimize distortion at the 90mm level. In the Guncon 3 itself, there are chips dedicated to computing the location of the sensors, which can detect their position within 1/60th of a second and transmit the data to the PS3. These chips also contain the functionality to detect movement and tilt, just like a standard SIXAXIS controller.

On the software side, we offer two types of calibration to make sure the Guncon 3 is interfacing with the game in the best way possible. The first is a standard Time Crisis two-point calibration, but the other introduces five points, and ensures even greater accuracy.

OK! Now that I’ve answered some of your questions, I’d like to show you a few of the prototypes we went through before arriving at the final design for the peripheral.

Here’s our first attempt at what would become the final design – the grip for the left hand was added, as well as another analog stick and more buttons. I actually made this prototype myself with paper mache, the first time I had used the stuff in 30 years since elementary school!

Once we had approval on this basic design, we took it one step further with a Guncon 2 and actually did the work to wire in the modifications.

As we were working on the arcade version of the game at this point, we were able to actually use this prototype when playing the game. We found the basic functionality to be good, but the placement of the left analog stick was quite uncomfortable. As you can see in the above image, the location and angle are awkward for the player to hold the grip and use the stick. Hoping to further refine our concept, we created several more prototypes.

These were all variations on our initial concept, with varying degrees of success. The model on the lower right side of the image proved to be best in terms of functionality, use and comfort, so we launched full development of this prototype.

In addition to finalizing the look of the device, we also had to examine more technical items such as wave tests, safety tests, environmental standard tests and durability tests. As we completed each of these tests, it became clear that this would be the final design of the Guncon3.

Finally, after months of hard work, our design of the mass production Guncon 3 was completed. It was quite a special moment for us all!

We’ve completed our discussion of the creation of the Guncon 3, so now we can talk about the game itself. I’ll be back soon to give you an insider’s look at our development process!

Today, I would like to discuss our development process in creating Time Crisis 4 and the Guncon 3 controller. Four years have passed since I first came up with the framework of Time Crisis 4. In the autumn of 2003, after the completion of the PS2 version of Time Crisis 3, our development team started to examine what our next big step for the series should be. After kicking around some ideas, we decided to work on a new concept in which the player has full control over their on-screen actions, moving independently through the stage and shooting at enemies with an entirely new Guncon.

In most traditional arcade shooting games such as the previous installments of Time Crisis, players don’t have full control over their movement. Instead, the camera movements are directed precisely by the developer, while enemies show up quickly on the screen. This allows the player to focus on one specific action – shooting. As the basic premise for this type of game has broad appeal and is instantly engaging, we’ll continue to make these games in the future, but wanted to investigate a new path for Time Crisis 4.

The Time Crisis team has been eager to implement a solution for moving and shooting to the series for years now – our development tools allow us to do this in early builds of games – but it was too difficult to implement this feature into a full game using only the Guncon 2 controller. With our next title planned for the PLAYSTATION 3 system, we began work on our next iteration of the Guncon hardware to bring new functionality to the series and allow us to implement our goals for a free-roaming Time Crisis experience. We asked our designer to come up with a few illustrations showing a Guncon with one analog stick. After getting the results, we realized that this was going to be a more intimidating project than we had planned!

Putting our hardware demands on the back-burner for a while, we turned to the software side to try and put together a compelling demonstration for our concept. We worked for a month to create a prototype based on the Time Crisis 3 engine in which two players can move freely around a small square environment and try to shoot each other. We decided to go with a Vs. type game because we didn’t have an appropriate AI solution in place and needed to test it out as quickly as possible. Even though this early prototype only allowed for horizontal aiming, we felt confident enough in the design to move forward with the full game.

As we understood that we would have to implement vertical aiming in our game, we decided to revise our Guncon hardware designs to meet this goal. That was the real jumping-off point for Time Crisis 4, which I will cover in-depth soon in my next entry!