Fanime 2007: Shira Oka Panel

After looking around the swap meet and buying some cheap 5-year-old Japanese Newtype magazines, I went to the Shira Oka: Second Chances panel. The panelists from Okashi Studios (the developers) were the main programmer, a marketing person, an intern, and the lead artist. The main philosophy I got from the panelists about how they are going about their project is that they wanted to create a game that had more gameplay than visual novels and had more character depth. It was a pretty fun panel overall and I found out about how the game basically works and some background on its development.

You begin the game by making a character, giving him attributes, choosing his blood type, etc. Playing the game requires schedule management similar to Tokimeki. There are a number of minigames within the game and in one of them that was playable at their booth in the dealers’ room, you play an arcade game against one of the girls. Apparently, the difficulty changes depending on which character is your opponent and also on how far in the game you are.

From left to right: an artist, an intern, marketing (behind top hat), and a programmer.

There were three features that they pointed out in distinguishing their game from many Japanese ren’ai games out there. First, something that the artist brought up that the programmer wasn’t sure whether was a compliment or not is how the on-screen characters blink. It’s not at a predictable rate like every 3 seconds but rather it’s random. It impressed the main artist a lot and it was so interesting that, anecdotally, some employees once stood around for a few hours and tried to predict how long until the next blink.

The second feature is if you are talking to one person on screen and another bumps into the conversation, the first girl will slide over so that both are on screen rather than alternating between each girl appearing on screen alone. The third notable thing is that the characters’ changes in facial expression will be animated so a girl won’t suddenly jump from a smile to an embarrassed or angry face but instead will more smoothly and more naturally transition visually between her different moods.

Also, someone asked if they were fine with after-market patches, hinting at an adult mod to the game, and they replied that they didn’t mind and the artist (a woman) wanted to be contacted if someone actually developed something like that!

No release date has been set as of yet because they haven’t created a beta build. However, they hope to make one after the con season and plan to initially release it for PC and later to the Mac and Linux platforms if it becomes popular enough. Their next project after Shira Oka is supposedly going to reverse the roles and have the player controlling a girl pursuing a bunch of guys.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to trying out the finished product of Shira Oka and seeing how well this American-made game will play within the anime fan market.

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