Game Development/Koudelka

*Koudelka* is a Japanese horror RPG released for the Playstation in 1999, directed and written by Hiroki Kikuta.

### Early Development

He would read over a hundred books by the end of the project; but to begin, he started research in Japan, reading translated works from the west and nonfiction about western culture, such as the *History of Torture* and history of alchemy, a book exploring the history of ‘strange texts’ of magic and occultism; *Dracula’s End*, following literary and cultural trends about the hatred of cultural outsiders; and *City of Horror*, a history discussing London’s darkest historical events. It was in these books that Kikuta would come across the works of Roger Bacon, and the sinking of the Princess Alice.

Another text that was incredibly influential was *Carnacki, the Ghost Finder*, a work of fiction from the west written by William Hope Hodgson. It was a collection of occult themed detective stories, which were sometimes ambiguous about the reality of the strange things happening in the tale. Some stories were wrapped up with an explanation; some weren’t. He liked the ambiguity and the experience of real people facing supernatural things, and having to not only survive but solve the mystery. HP Lovecraft’s *The Case of Charles Dexter Ward* was also influential; as were many novels by Lord Dunsany, whose real name is Edward Plunkett… yes, that Edward Plunkett, the real world inspiration for the *Koudelka* character. There were also films that were part of his research, specifically *The Name of the Rose*, from 1986; he also read the novel that inspired the film. Visually, the photographic works of Bob Carlos Clarke, Jan Saudek, and Holly Warbuton, are also named as influences.

Though he researched eras of history stretching into the medieval, he chose 1898 as his time period, specifically the UK. It was a time of great change and a very potent historical era in the west. Technology and science were fast advancing, yet magic and mysticism still clung to the world. Psychics and fortune tellers would sell their expertise on the same streets as doctors and psychologists. In addition, the gas lamps used at the time could create an eerie kind of light and shadow that would add to the horror atmosphere.

He would narrow down the time and place of their game to one specific monastery, on one single night, because they simply didn’t have the resources for a larger game. While *Koudelka* would be an RPG, it wouldn’t be a large world, and there would be no traveling to various towns and cities across a large country. They had to cut down to the bare bones, in order to make something high quality; if they spread themselves too thin, they’d have nothing to show for it.

All in all, it took Kikuta about three months to put together his concepts and world building for the scenario of *Koudelka*, which he would not only develop, but also write, and draw the storyboards, using the techniques and skills he learned during his time as a manga artist. He would also design the map, though the building concepts themselves would be drawn by Matsuno Taizo, which were completed by February of 1998, as was the entire design of the map, with almost 100 rooms and eight buildings; each building had its own architectural style and age, to keep the experiences unique, as well as reflect the historical changes that occurred over time.

By this time, he’d also created the central conceit of their protagonist. Other characters in the story were easy; he was pulling on historical figures and events as his inspiration. But their protagonist would be a new person, and at first it was a struggle to imagine who it would be.

The eventual concept would be for a female Romani, exiled from her home, the “loneliest” of people, because she was outcast, and she was a minority in a dangerous time, essentially an “outcast of the outcast”. She had magical powers, relating to the themes of the supernatural, which would lead to her involvement in the story. And her name would be Koudelka: taken from the name of Josef Koudelka, the Czech-French photographer. Hearing the name, Kikuta found he couldn’t immediately place the culture or country of origin, and he liked that feeling of mystery and ambiguity.

At her heart, she was a character with strength, someone with a “soft exterior” and a “harsh personality”; Kikuta says in one interview that he likes women with a strong core, and if he was to name influences for the character, though he didn’t have specific figures in mind, someone like Winona Ryder in *Alien*, women “with a strong core”, were probably the most inspirational. From the beginning, Koudelka was a character with “thin lines but a strong core”.

*“I set her as the most lonely being who is not allowed to settle anywhere. There is no place for her in a peaceful and prosperous life. Only in the darkness of ruins, where cursed monsters and ghosts lie, you can barely find a space where you should be. Koudelka is such a sad existence.”*

The character’s design would be created via a contest; various artists were asked to design her, and from those concepts, one design was chosen. The winner would be a piece from artist Iwahara Yuji, drawn on March 26, 1998. He would draw more than 100 works of art for the game, including dozens of Koudelka, the first of which was this image of Koudelka alongside a gargoyle. While the game was in development, he would also write and draw the accompanying manga for the game, as well as many promotional images.

It was not the final design, but it was the starting point, as Koudelka’s character would go through vast changes as the limitations of their technology created problems with the design. It would be at least six months before her design was finalized and her model completed. The problem was that CG was still incredibly new in video games, and major leaps in games technology were happening constantly. Much of *Koudelka’s* development time

Other characters were not quite so difficult to develop; Edward would be drawn from history, and his design would portray a blend of criminality and heroism that hints at his dual nature. O’Flaherty would have the most variation in his designs, ending in a younger but clearly aged religious figure. These three would be their central team, and would come across a series of terrible events and supernatural frights in the monastery that night in October 1898.

Charlotte, the ghostly child they are confronted with, is also from the historical record; her parents are real figures, best remembered for their illicit love affair which saw Charlotte’s mother, Sophia Dorothea of Celle, spending more than half her life imprisoned, as she was at the time married to the future King of Great Britain. Charlotte is presented as the forbidden child born of their romance, raised in secrecy and left to die at the monastery, never knowing her mother was just as trapped as she was.

The two caretakers are also connected to history; Ogden Hartman is said to have been the captain of the Princess Alice, which struck a coal steamer and sank, drowning most of the passengers and crew. The SS Princess Alice was a British paddle steamer that collided with the collier SS Bywell Castle on the Thames in September of 1878. Nearly 700 people died, making it the greatest loss of life of any water accident in the British Isles.

And of course, Roger Bacon, the immortal magician whose research is central to the dark plot of *Koudelka*, is based on the historical Roger Bacon, an English philosopher and friar; and St. Daniel, mentioned as the creator of the monastery, may not be real, but his brother is based on Johannes Scotus Eriugena, or John the Scot.

More than the characters and events come from history; much of the worldbuilding is drawn from historical research and occultism, such as the Formors, mentioned in the Émigré Manuscript and by Bacon in the game, a reference to the mythical Fomorians of Celtic myth. The magical systems are built upon western alchemy and occultism; and the symbols associated with these techniques come from real world grimoires, and traditions such as Kabbalah. The amount of detail and creativity in the blend of these many histories, traditions, and myths, is truly astounding, and creates a beautiful and realistic world that feels as if it could almost be real in how closely its tied to our own.

### Trip to Wales

The goal wasn’t just to get an idea of what the country was like, but to take back resources that would assist the CG teams in developing the game; each person had a camera, and was taking pictures of everything. The actual images of castle walls would be used for textures, and real pictures of the environment would be behind the models of in game pathways and scenery.

They bought furniture, props, and materials from an antique shop; and while in London, they traveled to Foyles bookstore, where Kikuta bought about 100 books, boxed them up, and mailed them home. The cashier was apparently laughing at the piles and piles of books the team was piling up before her; but Kikuta couldn’t stand to leave any behind, because at the time, they were resources that were absolutely not available in Japan. He referred to the store as a “treasure trove” for those wanting to recreate the architecture in CG.

He also recorded sound while he was there for the environment sound effects; “*the sound of rain falling on a Welsh church; footsteps walking on an abandoned gravel road; the voice of seagulls flocking under the cliff. Waves that rush and shattered.”* They even used mocap while they were in Wales, to capture the movements and behaviors of the locals, in order to “provide culturally appropriate body language” for the characters.

> *The Japanese, who have various cameras such as digital cameras, optics, and video, and sit on the floor to take close-up shots of the patterns without listening to the guide, must have seemed quite strange to the eyes of the locals.*
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The most influential location they would see in Wales was St. David’s Cathedral, a very famous old building which would be the inspiration behind Nemeton Monastery, ‘Nemeton’ being a name used for Celtic holy places. St. David’s was established in 589, and thus has a long history stretching back more than a thousand years.

### Development of CG

The pictures were turned into a CD and sent out to various CG studios once the team returned to Japan; Wales would become the final location of their game. The original concept had been a town on the coast of Ireland, but after the trip, Kikuta chose Aberystwyth, Wales, which was in Ceredigion, the county next to Pembrookshire.

About half a dozen different studios would be involved in the CG and motion capture for *Koudelka*, including Japanese studios like Digital Media Lab, Shadow Entertainment, Japan Vistec, and D3D.

The head of D3D was Watanabe Shinji. They had no track record, but Kikuta was moved by their passion, and took a chance on them. Watanabe would be behind designing Koudelka’s in-game model, which would take about six months, given the challenges of adjusting her costume to work with the limited polygons, to fit Kikuta’s very specific desires for the character, and to work with the learning curve that came from using new technology. It’s likely the other character models were also D3D’s responsibility.

### Motion Capture

Around September of 1998, Kikuta came to the realization that motion capture would help cover the shortage of people the company had, and greatly reduce their workload. Motion capture, or mocap, was incredibly new at the time, and almost nonexistent in Japan. Kikuta knew that his game was going to require more than Japan’s industry could provide yet

He found a studio through his connections working on Square’s *Soukaigi*; Otake Shigeru of Daybreak had worked with Kikuta then, and he had connections in California that brought Kikuta together with FutureLight in Santa Monica, California, who have been heavily involved in pioneering motion capture techniques in the west, most famously in the film *Godzilla*.

*Koudelka* would be the first Japanese game to use lip synch, a technique used to match a character’s lip movements to the recordings of a voice actor’s performance. They would audition nearly a hundred people for the roles, and most of those involved would have little to no acting records outside *Koudelka*. It would be the first time four people were mocaped as one, and their performance would not just be recording their motions, but also their voices, at the same time. Kikuta asked the performers to memorize their lines and perform them all in one go, like it was a stage performance, one scene, one cut; the whole process would take about four days, and was recorded in January of 1999.

On the FutureLight side, the team would include Dan Michelson, the VP of the company, as well as John Schmidt, a mocap engineer, and Randi Stern, the motion capture developer and programmer who Kikuta called “everybody’s mom”.

Another company involved in the work was IPG, who seem to have been working on the voice acting and script translation side of things. David Waldman was the director, who flew in from New York to oversee the mocap sessions. Keith Garcia, the sound mixer, Paul Johnson, production manager, and Craig Eggertz, the script supervisor and AD, were also present.

On the Japanese side, the person in charge of the mocap was Takehara Shinji; for *Koudelka*, he would work as a motion designer and would oversee all the motion capture.

> I feel sorry for the person in charge of the capture. There were frames that lasted for as long as two months. There were also movies that were about 10 minutes long. We had to modify them frame by frame, or rather, assign them to the actual model so that they would move, which was a mind-boggling task. – Nagano
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By the end, *Koudelka* would have over an hour and a half of dialogue and movie cinematics, and there were hundreds of thousands of individual shots. Kikuta was very particular about the scenes, even correcting a scene himself when he felt the final render didn’t reflect his storyboard. The biggest problem however, was correcting jitter, the natural shakes the human body has which distort the mocap. The amount of data involved was huge; it got to the point that designers were asked to save the data locally on hard drives rather than bog down the company servers.

Another issue was color reduction; the Playstation could only portray 256 colors, which limited the palettes the team could use. In particular, they were going to need a variety of dark colors, to reflect the shadows and dim lighting of their haunted locale. They spent a lot of time experimenting with which colors and palettes would look best, and the dark colors were the hardest to produce well. They would also be working on motion work for monsters and creatures, which wasn’t mocapped, and so had to be done by hand.

### Music

Kikuta would be behind the soundtrack for *Koudelka*. He would compose the works, which took about six months, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to record them in Japan. He wanted to record the soundtrack in a church – but Japan didn’t have the resources; the soundtrack would be recorded at Air Studios in England, which was a converted church. He didn’t have the time to be present himself. Instead, the music was recorded over the phone line, in both England and Japan, at the same time.

It was a technique that had been used in other countries at the time, but Japan hadn’t done it before; and it was very expensive. It allowed Kikuta to hear the music across the globe, give his feedback, and record it at the same time.

Originally, he didn’t want to include music in the field or battle portions; he felt the sound effects and atmosphere were more important to focus on, and the silence would allow the audience to “cherish the atmosphere and presence” of the place. His favorite melody of the pieces he composed was from Kiss Twice, the final boss theme for the game.

Others working on the sound and music included Hirota Yoshitaka, who worked on sound effects; his goal was to “tap into the world of gothic horror” for the game, and to explore “fear and genuine emotions” of the gothic genre through sound. He was careful about creating the sounds; for the effect of feet stepping across a pile of bones, he went to a meat market and bought up a collection of real animal bones. He also remembers working hard on the sound of monster’s limbs waving through the air.

### Release and Reception

The project would run from the fall of 1997, to the end of 1999. Originally Kikuta wanted the game to release in October, on the same day that the events of said game were supposed to happen; but they couldn’t meet the deadline. It would instead release in Japan in December of 1999, in the US in the following June, and the UK in September 2000. In its home country, it was released along with a special CD, and in its first week, sold about 20k units. More than half of its sales would come from the United States; and in total, it likely hit 100k in its first year.

Responses were mixed; some reviewers were truly moved by the haunting gothic atmosphere and incredible CG environments. Others were turned off by the battle scheme, which was a unique twist on turned based combat that used a movement grid. The system also allowed for characters to learn or specialize in a variety of move types and magic, with over 140 weapons in the game. It was the most controversial element of the game.

Kikuta himself wasn’t a fan of the system; he felt the grid immediately took the player out of the experience, reinforcing the ‘gamey’ aspect, and originally he wanted *Koudelka* to be more of a puzzle and adventure style game. Kikuta says he was both ‘happy and disappointed’ with the project as a whole.