Yo yooooooooooo!!

Eguchi up in here! I’m willing to bet some of you are feeling kind of bewildered after Producer Kitabayashi’s announcement the other day. Production wasn’t green-lit, we just got an extension on our trial phase. But while some may see this as a pretty tight spot, I say NAY! This is a chance to turn the tables completely. Come on, let’s rise to the occasion!

Anyway, I think we’ve got to start taking action with things over which we have direct control, so for starters, I’m gonna give a more inside look at the development scene, which includes the revealing of content still in early stages of development. Sure we’re still in the trial phase, but that’s when game development is at its “juiciest”, with lots of things being thought up and tested out, so it’s a prime time to give everyone a good look! Now take a good look! These are some screens from our current test build.

I’ll grant that something is conspicuously missing from the center of the screen, but let’s just not worry about that right now. Of course, these images will all be in 3D when viewed on the 3DS.

Now with that shown, let’s take a look at the process that got us here!

â– Mega Man Legends Trial Development Record!

★Around June, 2010, we began Trial Development with an extremely small number of staff.

The earliest stages of development. We used this background as a preliminary test. All we had at this point was a big ol’ island to be wandered around on by Mega Man. . . . Classic Mega Man?! At this stage, we still didn’t have the player character model, so we borrowed the data from a different Mega Man model. Then we plopped out a big land mass to represent Klickelan Island. That brown stuff on the green is supposed to represent Teomo City.

This is our test city. As you can see, it’s got quite a strong European aesthetic. At this time, we still hadn’t solidified the direction we wanted to take in terms of town design. We tried out a variety of concepts, like having a train track running over the town, and a big blimp floating around.

★August, 2010

We used this expansive town area to run tests. In some ways, it had become much more Legends-esque. That’s the “mysterious old man” running around, but he’s not the protagonist of this game or anything. There’s also a servbot, but something seems a little off.

A test build of a ruin. It’s rather simplistic in form at this point. For some reason Bass is floating around in the distance.

The juxtaposition of bright and cheerful towns with dark and scary dungeons is one of the main pillars of the Legends world, so it shouldn’t be overlooked.

We had originally intended to create Klickelan Island in its entirety for the test build, but since the island is so enormous, we ended up deciding to just focus on the Teomo City region. We played around with different elements, tweaking the size of the town, the lighting and so on.

The big, foot-like structure in the center is actually a leftover scrap from a destroyed Reaverbot. We even had a gloomy, wasteland-like zone that looked like it could’ve contained zombies. The city had become a rather dynamic place.

★September, 2010: Just before announcing MML3

This was how Teomo City looked around the time we announced Legends 3 at Comic Con. The city appeared in a brief flash in our initial promo video. We had only built that which would enter the field of vision of someone in the middle of the town, but the island itself was very large. Also note that suddenly there’s now a rocket just outside of town.

Can you tell that one of those people in the plaza is Roll?

Anyhoo, that’s all the time I’ve got for today. Wondering how things will continue to progress? Stay tuned ‘til next time!