The Singular Design of Katamari
Damacy
(Game Developer Magazine: December 2004)
In Katamari Damacy,
The player controls a little lime green colored Prince, 5 cm [approximately 2
inches] tall. The prince’s father, the King of All Cosmos, accidentally
destroyed all the stars in the universe, so it is now the Prince’s job to roll
up katamaris in order to re-create the night sky. The
game then progresses based on this very weird story....
Keita Takahashi was the game director
for Katamari Damacy. When
he joined Namco, he wasn’t familiar with computers and didn’t even own a
PlayStation.
Publisher: Namco
Platforms: PlayStation 2
Full-Time Staff: 25
Development Time: 1.5 years
Released:
Tools Used: 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, Illustrator,
Optpix
CONTROLLERS BROKEN WHILE MAKING THE GAME: 13
The overall gameplay is very simple. The
player rolls the katamari (a big ball) around and
collects various items scattered throughout the levels. The items stick to the
ball and as the katamari amasses more stuff, it grows
larger and larger.
The entire
process of building this katamari is controlled with
the left and right analog sticks only. All you’re doing is rolling; there are
no miracle power-up items or friends who help you. The only other real obstacle
is a time limit for most stages. At the end of each stage, the katamari is lifted into the night sky and becomes a
constellation or a star.
Straight Ballin’
Luckily I was able to build a prototype of the
game before we started full development. I presented it to the company and the
people who were interested in Katamari, I asked the
ones who I thought where the coolest to join the team. This was the first time
that everyone really came together and met.
Katamari Damacy actually grew out
of my senior thesis project for a Namco-sponsored university. Namco and Digital
Hollywood (a digital arts school) collaborated on this project. A prototype of Katamari was made as an exercise. Namco handled the game
design, programming and art direction. The students made all the in-game
objects that the player could roll up. The purpose of this project was for the
students to learn the overall flow of the game creation process.
The idea behind Katamari Damacy just came to me.
It’s not as if I had been walking around town, saw a large ball with something
stuck to it, and suddenly was hit by inspiration. Current games suffer from a
distinct lack of originality, and this sparked my desire to create something
totally unique. It’s great that there are many types of videogames, but I’ve
always wanted to create something different that can only be done in a game. If
you are going to play a game that resembles a movie, you should just watch a
movie, and if you are going to play a game that shows realistic cars, wouldn’t
it be more fun to drive a real car?
Of course, I do
understand the fun aspects of these games. Moving freely in beautifully drawn
environments or driving a car you’ll never be able to own – those are
definitely fun experiences. But lately, there are just too many of those types
of games. And I think it has become boring.
Games these days are
also really complicated. There are lots of buttons and there are lots of items
to keep track of. I’m just tired of all those complications. To hold a
controller in your hand and control the action displayed on the screen is a
minor thing nowadays, but I still think it’s a little miracle. There’s no need
to ad a lot of extra stuff to make it more difficult.
What went right
1) Researching Scale. There is a stage in
the game where your katamari starts at 1m and the
ultimate goal is to grow the katamari more than 500m in diameter. In about the seventh or eighth month in development we were able
to show this growth in one sequence. I really let out a sigh of relief when
that all came together. Before we began, I had carefully considered the map
design and object placement to work together in the game, but until we finally
executed it, I was very nervous.
I
constantly had questions in my mind such as what objects should be available
for the player to roll up, would the objects fit into the memory, and how long,
in minutes, would someone have to play to get to the target size. The final
game came together pretty well, and we were able to effectively express a great
change in scale through the various objects collected, and the feeling of
enormity. In the end we just had to implement objects and roll them up to see
if they would work or not. We made adjustments using a trial-and error method,
rather than trying to figure everything out in our minds.
2) No Powerups I decided from the
beginning of development that we would not use any power-up items or similar
devices in the game. We didn’t even consider implementing special power-up
objects that would make the katamari bigger for a
limited time, or items that would allow the katamari
to roll up objects more easily. I think this allowed us to stay simple, allowed
us to create a game where you just “roll stuff up and make it bigger.” It was
great to be reminded that a game can be fun without such complicated items.
We thought about giving the player a specific level
objective, in addition to just making the katamari
bigger, such as rolling up a particularly large object to complete the game, so
the player would have a clear mission. However, if we did this, rolling up this
particular object could become the main objective of the game, and increasing
the katamari’s size might have been reduced to just a
mere process of reaching this goal. So, in the end, we decided not to use this
idea.
3) Controlling the rolling. I think we were able
to express the sense of rolling really well. Subtle elements of the game, such
as the sound effects generated when you roll something into the katamari, and the vibration from the controller, had a very
big effect in adding to the overall feeling of the game.
We also made
adjustments to the game design, so it really reflected the uniqueness of
rolling the katamari. For example, this game actually
does have some combo elements. In fighting games, the combo is usually
expressed by a number, but in Katamari Damacy, if you roll up multiple objects in a row, you will
see fireworks, confetti, or twinkling stars around the Prince, shown in the
bottom right corner of the screen.
4) Peaceful, Easy Feeling. The overall peaceful
ambiance of the entire game is really great. This includes many individual
elements, such as the graphic style, the color, the sound and music, the movies
and cut-scenes, the giant space mushroom and the overall theme of recreating
the night sky.
I am influenced
by what’s going on in reality, and it often shows in what I create. I am sure
the terrorist attacks and the war in
There is a lot of
aggressiveness and violence in games nowadays. I do not denounce this violence
completely, because it’s a part of human instinct
and is a very straightforward thing to express. What I tried to do was not only
bring peaceful feelings to the game, but also create
something totally different, which would be more exiting than just being
peaceful. I wanted to stimulate human instinct on a different level.
Because of the
uniqueness of the game, it was natural that the movies, sounds and interface
all carry this similar, unique theme.
5) Audible Excellence. The music/soundtrack
of the game came out really well. Games and music have a lot in common. I have
really had enough of the standard “the boss battle has music with tension”
approach, however. In Katamari Damacy,
there is no boss and there are no enemies, so we created a soundtrack that’s
original to the game.
I’ll let Yu Miyake,
our sound director, tell you about the music he created in his own words:
“Takahashi, the
director, allowed me to direct the music any way I wanted. I would never have
been given that kind of creative freedom working for an ordinary director. My
goal was to have the music appeal to everyone, and so I tried many different
methods of directing and creating tunes in order to have that appeal.
“I often record my melodies that I have in my
head using my cellular phone or PC by humming. My workspace is not completely
private, and my co-workers make fun of me if they hear me humming, so I always
record my humming secretly. I decided to insert this humming in the title
sequence of the test version of the game because I thought it would be funny
and a bit kooky. It was just a joke at first, but then people started to like
it so I decided to keep it – and that’s why you hear some weirdo humming when
you first load the game.
“I think the humming differentiates Katamari Damacy from other titles
and fits the gameplay perfectly. This humming is also included in the opening
theme music. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that singing is the best
instrument we humans have.
“Collaborating with outside musicians is now very popular in the game
industry, so we decided to hire 10 somewhat well known vocalists. As you know,
this game is very unique, and we weren’t really
sure which age group it would appeal to, so we decided to hire 10 in order to
get a range of talent to appeal to everyone.
“After selecting vocalists, our next step was to figure out how we could
enhance the mood of the game through the music. We actually used a somewhat
backward process in that we created the music after selecting the vocalists,
instead of before, so that we could use the vocalists
talents most effectively.
“We
were very serious when creating the music. Most game music nowadays is pretty
forgettable. I wanted to create a soundtrack that would stick in player’s
heads, sort of like an evil curse. I also wanted to avoid using a single
musical genre. Everything from the selection of the vocalists to the selection
of song lyrics, was carefully considered.”
What went wrong
1) Tipping the scale. This game is all about
“getting bigger” but sometimes I wasn’t able to truly feel that we had
accomplished this feat. Again, this is my personal opinion, but when you become
big, you instantly forget about when you were small. Even if you come back with
a big katamari to the map where you initially played
with a small katamari, you’ve forgotten about the
experience so you don’t feel like you’ve gotten really big. I wish we could
have engineered the feeling of “Wow, I’ve gotten so big” a bit more effectively
during gameplay.
2) Falling Apart. I thought it would
be fun to include a feature that would make the katamari
reduce in size and crumble. My idea was that when the katamari
comes across something it can’t roll over, or bumps into a large object; the
objects that it has rolled over previously should fall off, and the katamari shrinks a little. Basically,
a katamari that has grown to 200m in diameter can
become as small as 2m in diameter by bumping into something and thus crumbling,
so in the game you don’t just grow bigger, but you also can become smaller. I
hoped this would make the overall gameplay experience feel really free, but
there were various issues, and it turned out to be impossible.
Minor crumbling was
implemented, but we decided not to fully implement this feature because we
couldn’t really figure out natural solutions to some issues. For example,
objects rolled up by the katamari are absorbed into
it in order to reduce the load on the CPU, so when they are no longer visible,
the memory of the object is deleted. We were not sure how to deal with
objects that are absorbed and then have to reappear
and then disappear again when a katamari crumbles
down to nothing. As a result, the whole crumbling feature became vague and
wasn’t very effective in the end at all.
3) The Camera and the Queasy. The camera control
didn’t go as well as I thought it would. Thinking back on it, we could have
used the camera to add scale for the overall “gigantic” feeling, but we simply
didn’t have enough time. I wish we had more. Honestly I’m still not sure what
camera angle would have been best for this game.
I would have also
tried to prevent some of the 3D movement nausea that some people experience
while playing. Previously, I thought I needed to show how the katamari grew in size during the game so we made the camera
zoom out automatically when the katamari grows so big
that it occupies the entire screen. But maybe it would have been good enough to
allow players to look at the katamari simply from the
Prince’s point of view. It may have added more sense of scale if we had the tip
of a katamari blurred, or had some clouds over it as
it grows and becomes gigantic.
4) Not Getting Oblong. I felt strongly that
the katamari should roll the way it would if it
actually picked up a new object. For instance, if you pick up a long stick-like
object, such as a pencil, the pencil sticks out of the katamari.
In the real world,
it’s impossible to roll something like that grouped into a single object, but
in this game, we’ve ignored the rules of physics and allowed for any large
object to stick out. The katamari will still roll,
but in a larger arc. This arc-like movement will then adversely affect gameplay
– the control becomes unwieldy, and causes you to lose time. Of course, we
didn’t just add this movement in order to adversely affect the roll of the katamari – it is also a fun addition to enjoy a weird
rolling experience.
Truthfully, it
actually doesn’t look that fun, so I don’t think it’s executed well, but I was
hoping to create a game in which a negative effect could become a positive
experience. Also, the various objects scattered all over the stages are just
components that help you make your katamari bigger –
but that’s boring. Every object has a shape, and all the unevenness that’s
created by rolling up the various objects gives the katamari
a real “existence.”
In choosing the
objects players could gather, I wasn’t consciously trying to choose unique
objects. I just added what I thought players would want to roll up – tho I'm not really sure about the giant mushrooms and giant
daruma statues. I couldn’t come up with any really
large objects so I just put “giant” in front of the names of objects that are
normally not that big.
5) Time Limits. Originally I
wanted to eliminate the time limit and let the player simply roll the katamari to make it bigger. But, I couldn’t figure out how
to make the game fun without a time limit, so I gave up on that idea at an
early stage.
I still think that
game developers are bounded by too many rules, and the time limit is one of them.
Some of the missions don’t have time limits. This is a small remnant of my
original intentions.
Gather No Moss
The game itself does not rely on words, and
you can play the original version even if you don’t speak Japanese. So I guess
it is a natural for the game to be available in
Not many games
use totally original IP and game design, as most of the best sellers in
In making Katamari I learned that at a game studio, we don’t need
partitions or instant messengers. The most important thing is to talk directly
to each other as a team. By doing so we were able to develop a game exactly as
we wanted. I think that really shows. I worked on the basic concept on my own.
I found that if I started to listen to others, the concept tended to become
diluted and unfocused. However, once the basic concept was decided, it was
helpful to have open discussions with the team. There were many more ideas that
were not used in the game, but I still got something out of all the different
ideas that were brought up even if I didn’t use them as they were presented.
We had several goals
when making Katamari. We wanted to make a game that
would appeal to people who have become disillusioned with recent games and
rekindle their passion. We wanted to do away with the current stereotype that
has become the norm in the industry where both the developers and the players
have come to accept a set of arbitrary rules as standard, despite the fact that
videogames are still a very new media. Most importantly, we wanted people to
have fun and enjoy their gameplay experience.
Like most game
creators, I am not totally pleased with the final product. Also, I expected
that some people would love it and some would hate it, because the game
features very unusual graphics. I am surprised and pleased, however, to receive
mostly favorable reviews to date.
I am honored
that most of the reviews (in
We are living in a
strange world when I see that this “half baked idea” is being praised as
something totally new. I’m not trying to be humble, but it would be great if
the favorable reviews of this game motivated other people to create something
new, without focusing on the bottom line for once.
Lindsay Gray, Ka Kimura, Naataka
Higashiyama, and Yoko Nakao are acknowledged for
translating this article from the original Japanese.
Arigato to you all! – RH.