Inti Creates Explains the Development Processes Behind Mighty No. 9

In terms of Kickstarter success stories, Mighty No. 9 is undoubtedly in the top tier. With last year being an anniversary year for the Blue Bomber and Capcom making no moves to produce an official game, Keiji Inafune rather cleverly gauged the mood and seized the moment. As the figurehead well known for the Mega Man series, his announcement of a spiritual successor naturally captured the imaginations of thousands of games and ensured a major success in the crowdfunding campaign.

Stretch goals reached included versions for both the Wii U and 3DS eShop stores; Inti Create is developing the former alongside Inafune-san's Comcept, along with the PC and home console iterations. Development is progressing ahead of a still-distant April 2015 target release — with early screenshots and video emerging — and Inti Create's President and CEO Takuya Aizu has used the game's podcast to explain a little more about the processes currently going into the game. His comments, translated by Siliconera, are below.

Usually, in normal development, we usually create the intro stage first and then create the last stage next, and we were taught that that’s how you make good games.

That’s how we’ve been doing it in many situations, but in current days, we’ve been in situations where we’ve been asked to submit a vertical slice. So basically, if we start creating the intro first, we’re not able to show a good vertical slice.

So, what we do is—and this is what we’re doing in this case—we pick one of the normal stages and we create it, and we create it in a way that you could play it over and over again, so people can judge what the game is going to be like. And then we move on to the intro stage, and then create the last stage.

That’s the ideal way of moving, but a lot of times, the designs for the last boss comes in later during development, so sometimes we’re not able to do the ideal case of making the last boss stage after the intro boss stage, because the designs aren’t ready.

The Mighty No. 5 stage is the level being put together first, as outlined above, with Inafune-san being presented with a new build to play at least once a month.

Inti Creates certainly has quite a pedigree, having developed both Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10, as well as doing some work with lead developer WayForward on Shantae And The Pirate's Curse. Are you looking forward to Mighty No.9's arrival next year?