Development
Yggdra Union had a small development team, consisting of less than 25 members. Shinichi Ito, director and designer of Riviera, played the same developmental role in Yggdra Union. Also reprising their roles are composers and sound designers Minako Adachi and Shigeki Hayashi. Masanori Ishikawa, one of Riviera's programmers, returned to be one of the two Yggdra Union programmers. Riviera's character designer, Sunaho Tobe, managed the card illustrations, with Satoko Kiyuduki taking on character design. Sting also contracted Atlus USA to write English text for the Japanese version's script.
The game started development in early 2005 under the project name "YGG", with the official unveiling to the public being in October 2005 through Famitsu and Sting's official site. The game changed quite a bit throughout its development. In early designs, the GEN stat did not exist, characters instead being assigned LDS and INT stats, as well as a "FREEZE" status effect that did not make it into the final version. Also in these early designs, the character art was incomplete, leading the designers to resort to the recycling of Riviera resources during development. In the first released screenshots, it can be seen that Aggression functioned in reverse, the directional buttons coinciding more literally with the change in Aggression produced by their manipulation, rather than symbolically. The cards were initially shown to have a great deal more MOV, along with the much larger maps.
There were some problems in Yggdra Union's development. One such situation was a worry that they would not be able to fit all of the data onto the cartridge, but Sting okayed the release of the game on a larger cartridge, alleviating any space problems. The largest problem was character design. Many different character designs were produced, but the creators of the game had difficulty agreeing on which ones to use.
The PSP version, also initially revealed by Famitsu and soon after confirmed by Sting, was given many new features, including completely redrawn sprites and new characters, as well as modified game mechanics such as increased unit capacity, and an animated opening cutscene previewed on the development blog. Other changes include new story sequences following one of the endings of the game, returning character Pamela as playable, a hard mode, new status effects attached to several skills, as well as new cards and battlefields.
Read more about this topic: Yggdra Union: We'll Never Fight Alone
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“As long as fathers rule but do not nurture, as long as mothers nurture but do not rule, the conditions favoring the development of father-daughter incest will prevail.”
—Judith Lewis Herman (b. 1942)
“The Cairo conference ... is about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)