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Deadly Premonition

Dev talks Deadly Premonition

"We didn't have the time or resources"

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Deadly Premonition was last year's marmite title - a low budget horror that swung between bizarre yet hilarious cut scenes and basic third-person action sequences.

It was loved and ignored in equal measure, the skewed opinions so strong in their respective thoughts on the title they bled into the game's marketing over here in the UK, asking players which side of the divide they'd fall on.

Months on and Gamesindustry.biz caught up with creator Hidetaka 'SWERY' Suehiro to discuss the game - and the developer acknowledges you can't win everybody over, but that the lack of "time and resources" was a problem.

"When you're developing a game, you can follow one of two patterns. One is that everybody loves it 100 per cent. The other is that not everybody loves it completely, but loves it enough to make the game. Our pattern was a third pattern, where we didn't have the time or the resources to get everybody totally in love with it."

In the interview, Suehiro-san goes on to explain that originally the central gameplay mechanic was flight rather than fight - and guns only came into play after pressure on the studio to include them.

"It was towards the middle of the development cycle when we were told that we needed to add some combat to the game. At the time I felt that it was completely unnecessary - we already had a breath-holding mechanic where you ran away from enemies...but people kept saying, 'you're controlling an FBI agent, you should be able to shoot a gun.'

It was hard was hard to argue against that - and I tried! We ended up putting it into the game but we ran out of time for tuning."

Deadly Premonition

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