Danganronpa and The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy director Kazutaka Kodaka and composer Masafumi Takada participated in a discussion panel during The Tenth Mosaic, a video game-centered event held at the Institut français du Japon in Tokyo last month. As reported by Game*Spark, during the session, Kodaka talked about his creative process at Too Kyo Games, and the reason why his new studio doesn’t make games fully in-house.
Kodaka left Spike Chunsoft alongside some of his other peers to establish Too Kyo Games in 2017. But while the studio is home to only 10 employees including Kodaka himself, their approach to game development is not indie. For The Hundred Line, the company’s first original IP, Too Kyo Games partnered with Media.Vision as the developer (particularly when it comes to the SRPG gameplay), while the subsequent visual novel Shuten Order was developed by Neilo, with Too Kyo Games handling planning and scenario writing.
Commenting on this approach, Kodaka said, “If we tried handling development ourselves, the team would end up growing to as many as 50 people. That would mean we’d be forced to work nonstop and even take on projects we don’t personally agree with.” In other words, Kodaka thinks that having a larger team to support would also result in his company having to take up projects other than the ones they truly want to make, just to keep the whole organization afloat.
Therefore, Kodaka’s current approach to game creation revolves mainly around coming up with the characters and the story, while the actual development is outsourced to other companies. “I make things I like with other people’s money,” Kodaka joked.
But while Too Kyo Games’ core team has been kept at a relatively small scale, 2025’s The Hundred Line ended up spiraling into a massive gamble for the company. During the talk session, Kodaka also revealed that they invested about 500 million yen (roughly $3.16 million USD) of initial capital for developing the new IP, while the final cost ended up exceeding 1 billion yen (roughly $6.32 million USD). “Since a team of 10 people made it, this means we invested about 100 million yen per person,” he said.
Related articles: Interview: The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy’s devs needed players to think they were “completely out of their minds” to compete in the game market
