Discussing ‘Rainbow Cotton Remaster’ With Developer KRITZELKRATZ 3000’s Andreas Scholl – TouchArcade

Andreas Scholl (AS): Hello there, my title is Andreas Scholl and i’m situated in southern Germany near Munich (with its well-known Oktoberfest). I’ve been in love with video video games since I used to be a child taking part in the primary arcade video games like Pac-Man and Defender again within the 80s. I took the position of lead programming for Rainbow Cotton. Along with my shut buddy Pascal Heiler, I managed the general challenge and we made the entire main selections.

Pizza is after all considered one of my favourite dishes, who would have guessed. As I’m a vegetarian I normally go together with veggie toppings.

TA:  How does it really feel to be engaged on such a well-loved franchise as Cotton?

AS: It is sort of a dream come true. As I’m a nerd for Japanese video video games and likewise cherished the Dreamcast with all of my coronary heart it was the right challenge for me. Seeing all the beautiful artwork, 3d fashions and animations every day was an important motivation.

TA: What was your first expertise with Cotton? Your Cotton historical past, if you’ll?

AS: I knew the Cotton collection from the Sega Saturn so I remembered it as a facet scrolling arcade shooter with cute graphics. I believe I hadn’t performed Panorama Cotton or Rainbow Cotton earlier than beginning to work on the challenge. So I needed to do a little bit of a catch up in the beginning. Generally, I really like Cotton for her uncommon character, like she seems to be tremendous cute but additionally has this egocentric Willow demanding persona and doesn’t care if she has to make use of brute pressure to get what she desires.

TA: What have been a few of the challenges concerned in remaking Rainbow Cotton for contemporary platforms?

AS: One of many greatest challenges was the sheer quantity of code we needed to port. I completely underestimated this after I made the primary prototype of the sport. The mini bosses and managers in Rainbow Cotton are advanced encounters that every one have their very own specialised code, quite a lot of the time containing sophisticated procedural movement features. There’s additionally quite a lot of difficult math concerned, so the unique code wasn’t simple to learn and perceive. Whereas remaking we additionally needed to combine quite a lot of modifications to the code to make it framerate unbiased and work correctly with the trendy sport engine.

TA: Rainbow Cotton in all probability has essentially the most blended status of your complete collection in its authentic type. Are you able to converse to a few of the enhancements which have been made for this remake?

AS: After I first performed the sport the very first thing that got here into my thoughts was that the controls have to be improved for the remake. I then learn quite a lot of critiques and watched playthroughs from different individuals, simply to seek out out that almost all of them had the identical points with the sport. Fortunately after I talked to our writer and SUCCESS they advised us that we had the liberty to enhance the sport mechanics.

One other gameplay component that was determined early on to be enhanced was the fairy concentrating on mechanic. It’s a nice function that you could ship out the fairies to assist assault the enemies, but it surely didn’t really feel nice within the authentic sport. Within the remake the participant can mark the enemies with the crosshair and ship them out reasonably shortly.

There have been a number of different high quality of life modifications like including a life bar for the bosses and minibosses and displaying the participant the place he has to fly to take branches within the levels.

TA: How concerned (if in any respect) have the unique builders been on this remake? Did you get any recommendation or steering from them? If that’s the case, what?

AS: The contact with SUCCESS was principally by way of our writer, so I don’t actually know if any or which of the unique builders have been taking part within the challenge.

I met Shinya Nagatomo-san (the producer of Cotton Rock’n’Roll) in particular person on the Gamescom and we had a pleasant conversion about Rainbow Cotton and the gameplay enhancements. Additionally they gave us suggestions on the totally different milestones we made with feedback what they wish to see improved.

When the sport was introduced on the Tokyo Sport Present there have been a few of the authentic voice actors taking part in the sport.

TA: What are you personally most happy with within the Rainbow Cotton remake?

AS: I’m most happy with the gameplay enhancements that we made and that after taking part in Rainbow Cotton so many occasions throughout growth I’m nonetheless having enjoyable taking part in it. For me it’s actually vital to make the followers of the collection comfortable, so the largest factor for me can be that the sport is effectively acquired by the Cotton group.

TA: Is there something you wished to do on this remake that you just simply couldn’t make occur?

AS: I discovered an early article about Rainbow Cotton that acknowledged that Cotton may get off her broom and stroll by way of the levels, and I puzzled the place this was coming from. Whereas porting the participant code I noticed that there have been quite a lot of remnants of this gameplay mechanic. So I believed possibly I may get this to work someway. I attempted to reactivate the code and the gameplay mechanics for this function to have Cotton operating, capturing and utilizing her magic whereas operating. It regarded actually cute. Sadly, I couldn’t actually combine it as an actual function into the remake attributable to time constraints. I’m additionally guessing that there have been many issues and edge circumstances occurring from this deliberate function, which is why they scrapped it again then.

We built-in Cotton’s standing and operating animations into the remakes possibility menu to get a glimpse of how it could look.

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I need to thank the entire followers of Cotton and usually followers of retro video games for his or her loyalty. Additionally I need to thank Derek Pascarella and his workforce for making the English fan translation of Rainbow Cotton. They have been additionally part of the remake’s growth workforce.