Hi there, it's Kobayashi.

It's well and truly autumn now...
The temperature has dropped, so our car engines and tyres should stay in top condition.
It's the perfect season for mountain drives and circuit running!

...however, this time of year is really busy for the Wangan Maxi Project Team.
The project members are all working hard, by day, night and even on holidays.

At first, I wasn't so directly involved with the planning of the new Wangan Maxi 3DX game, but I had been watching Maeda and Uchida working themselves to death out of the corner of my eye, occasionally giving them some verbal encouragement...

But then I got ended up being hurriedly recruited into the development team because there just weren't enough people to work on the project! Nooooooo...

I got a taste of the hell that is debugging for the first time in ages.
I've been working through Story Mode from morning to night, and making totally sure that there are no bugs in the dress ups for ghost battles.

I've also been making improvements to the scenarios in Story Mode to try and raise the overall finish of the game.
This work has been split between Maeda, Tetsuo and me, and it pretty much involves reading the original comic over and over again, thinking of some rough plot ideas, then creating stories that can fit into a five or ten story set, all the time taking lines from the original comics. Once that part is done we need to make a final draft, then have it translated into English for overseas Wangan fans.

We also needed to get some video footage together for a presentation at the AM Show, so we've been making movies of the new car types in 3DX, like the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution and the Subaru Impreza WRX STI.
The main thing is to get the cars moving really sweetly.
Saying that, a gamepad can only output a zero or a one (being digital), so it's really difficult to get the cars to move smoothly with no jerking around.

When we do manage to get some nice data of the cars running smoothly, the next think we do is set up the camera so that the car looks as cool as possible. This is where real car fans can display their talents.
The movies were made by Maeda, Tetsuo, me, and a new face and rising star in the visual world, Jufuku.
We all love cars and bikes, and each one of us took really distinctive and totally cool pictures.
Tetsuo has taken loads of these movies before, and is becoming quite the professional...
Tetsuo made lots of the movies at the start of Story Mode - they look awesome, right?
I've got to try even harder!

So...we're working pretty hard with all this stuff, and we end up missing the last train home most nights.
That's not so good, but it's great to do some development fieldwork for a while, even though it is a challenge

And so the project is moving towards the grand finale.
All the team members are making the final push so that Wangan Maxi Fans can enjoy our games for many, many years to come. Get ready for Wangan Maxi 3DX - it's coming soon!!

Mr. Maeda, when we get this game finished let's go for a drive

(Original article in Japanese released on 10.1.2008)