Ratatan Development Log #2: Early Game Concept

Introduction

This time, I'd like to look back at our original game proposal.

At this stage, there were no gameplay screenshots, and many aspects of the game had yet to be defined.

However, the proposal clearly shows what we were trying to achieve from the very beginning.

Looking back at it today, it's fascinating to see both the ideas that survived and those that changed along the way.

A New Game Design Beyond PATAPON

Ratatan began as a project involving PATAPON series director Hiroyuki Kotani and composer Kenmei Adachi.

We never intended to recreate PATAPON.

Instead, we wanted to explore what could come next.

Our goal was:

"To create a new game design that evolves beyond PATAPON."

We wanted to preserve the satisfaction of rhythm commands while giving players direct control over their characters.

The challenge was to combine rhythm gameplay and action into something entirely new.

This slide captures the direction we envisioned from the very beginning.

The Multiplayer Challenge

There was another major theme.

Multiplayer.

At the time, one of TVT's biggest goals was to take on the challenge of creating multiplayer games.

Ratatan was planned as the flagship project for that initiative.

For that reason, cooperative play was built into the game from the very beginning.

Why Roguelite? Steam post image

Steam was always intended to be our primary platform.

That led us to ask a simple question:

What kind of game should we create for a global indie audience?

One of the answers we arrived at was roguelite.

By that time, Steam had already become home to many outstanding roguelite games.

Our idea was to combine:

• Rhythm gameplay

• Multiplayer

with roguelite mechanics to create an experience unlike anything else available at the time.

Looking back, many of the ideas shown on this slide eventually became part of Ratatan.

A New Challenge with Respect for the Original

We spent just as much time on the visual direction as we did on the game systems.

The reason was simple.

PATAPON's visual identity was already close to perfect.

Its simple yet powerful design had become iconic.

Simply following the same direction would have resulted in imitation.

On the other hand, changing too much would have meant losing the qualities we admired in the first place.

Finding the right balance proved incredibly difficult.

Early concepts leaned much more heavily toward a steampunk aesthetic.

At this stage, we still hadn't found the answer.

But one principle never changed.

We wanted this project to be:

• A new challenge.

• A respectful successor in spirit.

It took countless iterations before we eventually arrived at Ratatan's final visual identity.

We'll talk more about that journey in a future article.

Looking Back

Reading this proposal again today, I can still see many ideas that eventually became part of Ratatan.

At the same time, I also recognize one of our biggest mistakes.

We tried to tackle too many major challenges at once.

The biggest challenge was combining rhythm gameplay with direct character control.

That alone would have been an ambitious goal.

On top of that, we also decided to build:

• Multiplayer

• Roguelite mechanics

Each of those could have served as the foundation of an entire game.

Trying to develop all three simultaneously made the project far more difficult than we expected.

Although Ratatan eventually found its identity, if I were starting a brand-new IP today, I would probably focus on fewer major innovations at the beginning.

One of the most important lessons I learned as a producer is finding the balance between what you want to create and what you can realistically achieve.

Next Time

The original proposal already contained many of the ideas that would eventually become Ratatan.

But what happened when we actually tried to turn those ideas into a playable game?

Next time, we'll look back at our first prototype and the early design documents, and discuss what we learned from those first experiments.

Note

The presentation slides shown in this article were originally created in Japanese and have been translated into English specifically for this development log.