Gyakuten Kenji 2 Blog Entry 13: Scenario Camp! (2010)

Title: Scenario Camp! / 「シナリオ合宿！」
Source: Gyakuten Kenji 2 official site

Summary: In the post published on November 26th, 2010 on the official Gyakuten Kenji 2 (Ace Attorney Investigations 2 - Prosecutor's Gambit) developers blog, character designer Iwamoto Tatsurō writes a bit about the "writing camp" they held during the development of the game. The staff members that were involved with the scenario would stay for four nights at a company-owned resort, where they could concentrate on the scenario. As the character designer, Iwamoto was tasked with making rough sketches for the characters, which in turn would lead to changes or finetuning the scenario, like a feedback loop. While the trip turned out to be a lot more work than Iwamoto had initially expected, they also had time for some fun, like a character drawing contest, and the creative creations by producer Eshiro Motohide, director Yamazaki Takeshi and planner Furukawa Yuuki are revealed by Iwamoto here, together with sketches of those three men by Iwamoto.

Images are taken from the source article. Copyrights belongs to the respective owners.

Scenario Camp!

 

 

 Title: CAMP!!

1) At camp we talked…
2) And drew a lot
3) We weren’t staying at a hotel, so I shared a room with the director, but…
4) neither of us can sleep with someone else around so we lied awake all night
The next night, we moved to different rooms.

Hello. Character designer Iwamoto here. Today I want to talk about something that was crucial to the creation of Gyakuten Kenji 2 (Ace Attorney Investigations 2 - Prosecutor's Gambit): the Scenario Camp.
 

We held this camp near the end of last year’s summer, staying for four nights at a company resort home called Capcom House. It was pretty exciting. You see, I was always a fan of that famous story of how the film director Kurosawa Akira went into kanzume mode at an inn together with his script writers, and how they would discuss everything with each other in order to create the script. (TN: kanzume means “canned” as in “canned food” and refers to a practice from the publication industry where editors basically keep an author or manga artist in a hotel room or somewhere away from home without distractions to ensure they’ll meet their deadlines).
 
I really liked the ring to the term “ scenario camp” But at the same time, I wondered what I was going to do there. As I was an illustrator. I heard there was a pool there too, so perhaps I could just relax all day in the water…

I was a fool, I can only say.

We’d discuss the plots of the scenarios, then I had to draw many rough sketches based on those plots, and based on that we’d come up with new ideas for the scenario, and that would lead us to discussing new game mechanics…

And everyone worked really hard, so the coward I am, I couldn’t be found slacking of course.

But there was one time we could relax while we worked hard in camp. That was at the “Gyakuten Kenji Character Drawing Contest, Without the Illustrating Staff!!” Participants had to draw characters like Mitsurugi (Miles Edgeworth) or Mikumo (Fay Karaday) without looking…

 

 ← Eshiro　Yamazaki →

Do these two even have any love for the Gyakuten Kenji series? Or are they just making fun of me?

 

By Furukawa

This one bugged me in a different way. And he drew this like it was nothing! Hrmph!

Thanks to this outing, I managed to create rough sketches for about 75% of all the characters, and we decided on the direction we wanted to go. The sketch of Mikagami (Verity Gavèlle) producer Eshiro showed in the previous blog post was also created then. So this ended up a meaningful trip.

Next up is the Puppet Master Shiozawa. Look forward to a post that will reveal the deepest secrets behind Gyakuten Kenji 2 even I don’t know about!