Guilty Gear creator Daisuke Ishiwatari’s announcement of his new top-down action RPG, Damon and Baby, during last year’s Arc System Works Showcase took many by surprise. While many expected the game to feel similar to the popular anime fighting game franchise, Ishiwatari says its initial inspiration came from Castlevania and his desire to prepare young ArcSys devs to create unique titles of their own.
In an interview with Korean outlet GameMeca, Ishiwatari revealed that Damon and Baby is ArcSys’s first step toward gaining experience in raising the quality of small-scale games to a certain standard (note that this is based on machine translation, so exact nuances should be taken with a grain of salt).
His goal with Damon and Baby is to create a unique action RPG that will hopefully become popular in the indie game scene; something that, in his words, “could rival Castlevania” (he likely refers to Castlevania’s impact on the gaming industry). Instead of “just copying and pasting existing elements” and taking the same route as their existing titles, the developers wanted to create something that would highlight their unique strengths.
While Damon and Baby originally began as a side-scrolling gun action title, it soon evolved into the twin-stick shooter it is today. With the genre set in stone, the theme of demons mixed with gunplay soon followed.
In addition to appealing to indie fans, one of the game’s primary goals is to nurture its younger developers. While ArcSys is known for its high-quality fighting games, according to Ishiwatari, its younger staff members don’t have much experience when it comes to creating titles of other genres. In this case, the primary motivation behind Damon and Baby was to allow younger developers to gain experience in working on different genres, like working on an action RPG from start to finish.
Ishiwatari adds that creating an indie-like game within a big studio like ArcSys isn’t the same as with a small company, as the required manpower and budget would increase significantly, resulting in a title that would no longer be able to offer a kind of competitive price associated with indie games.
Instead of a traditional development cycle, Damon and Baby’s development was much shorter, with less time spent on specifications and design documents. This allowed the developers to focus more on the game’s action-puzzle elements and overall exploration – gameplay aspects you don’t see in every action RPG. Those looking for a challenge, however, will be pleased to know that ArcSys didn’t skimp on the boss battles, which Ishiwatari says resemble bullet hell shooters.
Damon and Baby is set to release on March 26 for PlayStation 4 and 5, Nintendo Switch, and Windows (Steam).
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