Drill Dozer – 2005 Developer Interview

Ken Sugimori - Director
Hironobu Yoshida - Character Designer

―As director, how does it feel now that Drill Dozer is finished?

Sugimori: The last game I directed was Pulseman, in 1994…. so it's been 11 years. At that time I wasn't yet a seasoned developer, and was still in the midst of my own personal growth, so it was also a learning experience for me. Now, as time has gone by, we have more and more staff members at Game Freak whose only experience with game development has been Pokemon, and it's come time for me to think a little about how to continue their professional development. That's why for Drill Dozer, my main job was the drawings, but I left the character design to Yoshida, and most of the gameplay was the result of the younger staff's efforts.

Finally, in the past when we made action games, there would be ideas that got left by the wayside, things we were never able to implement due to memory limitations or deadlines. I wanted to use all those pent up ideas with Drill Dozer, and I feel like we fully succeeded there. Over 10 years of ideas… I definitely feel a weight off my shoulders!

―What inspired you to make Drill Dozer?

Sugimori: We'd finished Pokemon Ruby Sapphire, and were working on Emerald and Fire Red/Leaf Green at the same time, but both of these were upgraded versions of previous games; neither one required a huge team. Perhaps we could take advantage of this lull, I thought, and make a whole other game. The staff had also been asking for awhile if they could make something brand new (non-Pokemon), and many said they wanted to make an action game, so now was a good chance. I'd been kicking an idea around in my head for a "drill game", so I gathered 4 or 5 people and we started working on it as a small team.

―Why were you thinking of a "drill" game, specifically?

Sugimori: Well, there's a lot of games out there where you fight with guns and blades, or punching and kicking, and I wanted to make something that wasn't that. At the same time, I personally like aggressive action games where you get to attack a lot, so I still wanted the player to wield some kind of weapon, and a drill seemed like it could open up a lot of interesting ideas for action gameplay. Aaand I can't deny that, for me personally, I had an image in my head of something you might see in a tokusatsu flick or something, you know, some weird monster drill that can drill through anything!!! (laughs) Of course there's nothing realistic about it, but visually it looks cool―the kind of thing a kid would totally get into. So that's why I think it came out looking the way it did in Drill Dozer.

―Was the drill button assigned to L/R from the beginning, then?

Sugimori: Fairly early on, yes. First came the whole idea of upgrading the drill's gearbox, and once that system was solidified and we'd added the rotation movement, we realized it would be more interesting to have a control system where the drill can rotate in both directions. The L and the R buttons are perfectly situated on the GBA for that. It just made the most sense.

―What about the vibrating cartridge? Was that also an early idea?

Sugimori: That actually came much later. On Pokemon Pinball Ruby and Sapphire (GBA), if you play it on the GameCube's Game Boy player, the GameCube controller will vibrate. So likewise, for Drill Dozer, I thought Nintendo would be more receptive to the game if we showed it to them with the same Game Boy Player vibration functionality already prepared. (laughs) Then later, it was actually Nintendo themselves who suggested "Why not make the cartridge itself vibrate?" That was a stroke of luck for us. Drill Dozer is the first GBA game to feature such a vibrating cartridge and I heard it was initially something of a technical challenge for Nintendo, but they made a special housing for the cartridge which made it work. It's a bit difficult for us to make hardware requests to Nintendo, so in that sense we were very lucky that they suggested it themselves.

―The way the drill gauge is so big on the screen gives it a nice visceral impact, too.

Sugimori: At first that gauge was very small. The core gameplay of Drill Dozer is watching the gauge while you manipulate the controls, but to have the gauge up in the corner would mean you couldn't keep track of your character at the same time. So we decided that we needed a solution that always kept the player character in your main field-of-view. A gauge that big, taking up that much screen real estate, however, would need to be something special―and in that sense, another aim of having the gauge be so big was to impress and attract people, who upon seeing it for the first time are like, "whoa, what's that?" The gauge itself was designed by Yoshida.

Yoshida: I don't know if anyone noticed, but the shape is supposed to resemble a side view of the Drill Dozer itself. (laughs)

―Did Satoshi Tajiri have any input into Drill Dozer, by the way?

Sugimori: Towards the end, when the project was mostly complete, he gave us a lot of helpful advice. For example, the [Japanese] subtitle "goushin dorirurero" came from Tajiri's suggestion that the title needed some more pizazz to grab people's attention. We also wanted to have a name for the action of shifting up your gears, and he was the one who came up with the name "Doriappu" (Drill Up!). This is true for every development, but Tajiri has a talent for seeing things we've overlooked, and we're very grateful for his input.

―Where did the inspiration for the characters come from?

―Jill is a very unique character. What was the concept for her?

Yoshida: My original drawings looked completely different from the character now… I found it very difficult, and I was honestly stuck. Then one day, after receiving yet another round of criticism ("Sorry, that's not quite right!"), I was feeling like I'd exhausted all my ideas… so I went home that night and ate a roll cake. As I stared at the slices of roll cake, suddenly an idea came to me: you know, this might make a cute hairstyle…!

Sugimori: Whoa, really?! That sounds a lot like the origin story of Pac Man… (laughs)

Yoshida: It's true though. (laughs) So I had my wife take two slices of roll cake and hold them above her head, modeling it for me, and I drew the character right there. There's other characters in Drill Dozer who were inspired by food, too, like one where I used an onion as the motif for his head, and another, Fuguro, who's basically just a straight-up fugu fish. I tried to use everyday things that anybody would recognize.

Sugimori: So they're all modeled on food then. This is starting to sound like one of those stories you'd see in an issue of Game Creator Retsuden… (laughs)1

―How about the design of Jill's drill dozer?

Yoshida: Originally it was very plain, with a very normal "worker robot" vibe. We changed it though so that when Jill was riding it, it would visually feel more like a cyborg, or something she had transformed into.

Sugimori: She fits right snug into that tiny little robot.

Yoshida: Well, I mean in reality it doesn't make much sense but it's a game with exaggerated proportions, so. (laughs)

Sugimori: If you look closely, the Drill Dozer has a face on it. You know how with cars, if you look at the front fender and headlights straight on, some look like a smiling face, and others look like they're angry? It's kind of like that… it's got that unique expression that only a machine can have. I couldn't draw that―it's owed to Yoshida's sensibilities.

Yoshida: Naturally, since Jill is always driving the dozer, the two faces compete with each other. So I fiddled with the lines a lot, removing and adding, to get just the right balance between them.

―The difficulty balance of Drill Dozer is exquisite; how did you achieve that?

Sugimori: Well, it's very common practice, but we had people at Game Freak who were not on the development team testplay Drill Dozer, and we observed their reactions. If we saw them getting stuck somewhere, or not knowing where to go, for example, we would add a signpost there. This is something I've learned from my mistakes with games I made in the past, but if you make things too hard, or include lots of parts with cheap deaths, it leaves a bad memory in the player that lasts for a long time. So nowadays I try avoid unduly stressing the player out. Also, though I personally love action games, I'm not some super skilled savant either. (laughs)

―At the same time, though, it's also boring if you just breeze through a game with no difficulty whatsoever.

Sugimori: That's really the most challenging thing about making an action game, the fact that everyone has a different sense of what's difficult. There's people out there who will feel it's all too easy, but there's also those who can't beat the first stage. It's sort of like people's preferences with the spice level of curry. (laughs) In the manga Houchouninajihei, the main character aspires to create a curry "with a level of spice that will satisfy everyone!" And I suppose our ambitions as action game developers are very similar. (laughs) That's why I don't add an "easy mode" or anything like that. If we did that it would be akin to the bad feeling you get when someone lets you win at a game.

―Yoshida, we'd like to ask you some questions too. This was your first action game development... how was it?

Yoshida: I know it's obvious, but since this was completely different to Pokemon, everything about it was very stimulating. I especially learned a lot about character movement and animation. The first thing I do when making a character is draw an image of them on my PC… but I found that when we would take those characters and actually put them in the game, on-screen for the first time, their movement didn't look right at all. I learned that I need to animate them in a somewhat more exaggerated fashion for it to translate properly on-screen.

―Did Sugimori have lots of instructions and requests about the pixel art?

Sugimori: No, Yoshida would anticipate the things I would be annoyed or bothered by, and then just address them on his own. If anything, it was more like… hey, you don't have to make the animation that detailed!

Sugimori: I don't see that at all. (laughs)

Yoshida: There's just a tiny glimpse of it, right here… (laughs)

―Finally, Sugimori, we'd like to ask you some personal questions to round the interview out. What is your favorite thing?

Sugimori: I love Japanese pickles (tsukemono). From Kyoto, you know, I love stuff like senmaizuke, it's delicious. When I'm an old person I want to do my own pickling. (laughs)

―What do you hate?

Sugimori: I don't like really crowded places where people are packed close together. Even when it's supposed to be a party or celebration, I can't enjoy myself. When there's so many people that the air quality gets bad, I hate that. So I'm not a fan of big conventions and event hall spaces… (laughs)

―What is the most interesting game you've played?

Sugimori: Metroid. I actually modeled aspects of Drill Dozer after Metroid. One thing I loved in the original Metroid for the FDS, was when the disks would have to load and the screen would go all black… it was scary. I love the thrilling, heart-pounding feeling of Metroid, of being tossed alone into this alien world, the melancholy and loneliness of it.

―How would you sum your personality in one word?

Sugimori: Well, if we're talking about recently, maybe "short-tempered". Gotta take my calcium. (laughs)

―What did you think was "cool" when you were a kid?

Sugimori: Sports cars, like Lamborginis. I was in 5th or 6th grade when there was the sports car boom.

―How do you de-stress?

Sugimori: Playing with my cat. I got her about a year ago. Her name, in hiragana, is "momi".

―Looking back on your life, what's the biggest pinch you've found yourself in?

Sugimori: When I had to make the Drill Dozer presentation to Nintendo. (laughs) I was extremely nervous… Drill Dozer uses the LR buttons and requires you to move your fingers in a unique way. When I saw everyone at Nintendo trying it out and getting it just as I'd expected, it was a huge relief for me. They were fiddling around and playing with it, in silence, for almost twenty minutes!

―What's the funnest part of making a game for you?

Sugimori: The last stretch just before the final deadline. Physically it's exhausting, but knowing you're almost there makes it really exciting, and gives you that last push you need to get across the finish line.

―And what would be the hardest time?

Sugimori: The period just before that. (laughs) Getting everything up to that point is very psychologically tiring, there's a lot of anxiety about whether it's really going to work, and so on.

―Finally, if you could give a title to your life, what would it be?

Sugimori: Hibi kore shuugyou (日々是修行 - "Each day is an opportunity to learn.") Each time we finish a game, I feel like I've leveled up my own self. And life furnishes us with those opportunities again and again.

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