Ace Attorney creator looks back on the series' start, development challenges, team size, and much more

This week's issue of Famitsu contains an interview with Ace Attorney series creator Shu Takumi in advance of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy's release. You can check out a summary of the interview below.

- the series started with the title “Surviban,” which was derived from “survival” and “saiban” (“trial” in Japanese)
- the team around Takumi decided the term was too nonsensical to use for the title
- the team gathered around a whiteboard and discussed names, eventually settling on Gyakuten Saiban
- Takumi was told to change the name of the protagonist, Naruhodo, but fought for it to be retained
- the series was initially planned for the Gameboy
- when info started to come in on the GBA, the team decided to move it over to that platform
- the project started with Takumi writing the proposal in the Summer of 2000
- Takumi’s superior gave him half a year to work on whatever he wanted, which he saw as his chance to make a mystery game
- Takumi had always wanted to work on a mystery project, and even considered working at a book publisher to do so
- the idea to make it a game starring a lawyer came in early on
- while Takumi was still writing the proposal, his superior called him to say it would be a bad idea
- Takumi ignored that call and continued on with the idea
- Takumi first met with his team after the Summer holiday period ended, and it consisted of seven members
- most of the team had less than three years of experience, as the project aimed to give newer members experience
- the team had one planner (Takumi), two designers, two programmers, and one person each for sound effects and music
- Takumi ended up handling the scenario and direction alone
- the team ended up spending ten months, from September to June, working on the game
- at the time, Capcom was testing out development lines consisting of small numbers of younger members
- the recent Ace Attorney games had teams of around 30 members excluding support staff
- a lot of the style of the series was determined by hardware limitations
- illustrations were done in 256 colors, but they realized that if everything was in color it might use up too much space
- the team made evidence photographs and flashbacks in monochrome, which was only 16 colors, to save space
- Takumi oversaw everything, including the art and music
- his work on the scenario had him writing the story’s text, creating guides for the gameplay, setting timing for lines to be displayed, setting characters’ animations to match the text, and setting the timing for the sound effects, music, and screen effects
- the programmers made a tool that would make it easy for him to set the timings on these things early on in development
- this is how things worked up to the third game in the series
- the team’s size remained mostly the same up to the third game, when a few more people were on graphics and programming
- Ace Attorney was the first time Takumi would write a game scenario on his own and he had no idea what to do
- using his passion for the mystery genre, he first came up with the tricks
- he soon realized when writing the second chapter that he had not thought about the story at all
- when working on the third chapter, he was stunned by how bad his own writing was upon reading it
- at that point, he restarted from scratch