Interviews with Kenji Sada and Richard Robbins of Sunsoft

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tepples
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Interviews with Kenji Sada and Richard Robbins of Sunsoft

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Today in the NESdev Discord server, user ndiddy reported that Blaster Master (released in Japan as Metafight) reuses some of the engine of Sunsoft's earlier Famicom CNROM game The Wing of Madoola, including a similar level format paradigm, according to ndiddy's disassembly of the game. Given that the Blaster Master level format is a direct inspiration for the level format of the Full Quiet engine, this piqued my interest. I followed links to a couple interviews with the game's designer and lead programmer Kenji Sada.

From "The Making of The Wing of Madoola" by Stefan Gancer:
Sada: One thing that made The Wing of Madoola stand out at the time was the female protagonist Lucia. So why did Sada choose a woman in the main role? “If the protagonist was a boy, Madoola was too similar to Dragon Buster, wasn’t it?”, he said. He adds that he really don’t have a specific reason for making the protagonist a woman. Lucia seems to be the most memorable part of the game, she generates both fan art and cosplay even today.
(DRW had previously ruled out this game on grounds of overly heavy penalty for fainting.)

Excerpts of "Conversation with Kenji Sada" by Nathan aka ndiddy, regarding the nested metatile level format among other things:
Nathan: One thing I noticed is that Madoola uses a fairly complex level format with multiple layers of metatiles to save ROM space. What was your team's process like for designing a level, and then implementing it in the game?

Sada: It's not so much level design. To make the map wider, I came up with a multi-level tile configuration. Based on this, Sugiura, in charge of background graphics, created the tiles and the entire map.

N: Also, do you remember what the two additional programmers were working on?

S: The two programmers were responsible for the movement of the enemy characters. Actually, Metafight was also delayed in the same manner, and two additional programmers were responsible for working on the movements of the enemy characters.

N: Were there ever plans to release Madoola outside Japan, either on the NES or in the arcade? I noticed the arcade version has better English than the NES version.

S: Richard Robbins criticized Madoola so harshly that there was no international expansion. He said that games that sell in the U.S. are violent action games like Contra, and that female protagonists are not worth talking about. The English for the Madoola FC version was written by me. What was used in the arcade version was an elaboration of it by Sunsoft America.

N: What aspects of Blaster Master do you think could be improved on?

S: First of all, there was no decent level design. During production, there was no design from the perspective of looking at the whole game as a whole. We just packed ideas that we wanted to do, and didn't pursue fun from a player's point of view. I was so preoccupied with the size of the map that I didn't have any gimmicks or events to match the size. I have to fix everything from the beginning.

N: What aspects of Wing of Madoola and Blaster Master are you the most proud of?

S: When I started making games at Sun Electronics, I began with the scrolling display process. When I learned about the Famicom specifications, I was impressed by the functionality achieved while trading off cost, and I decided to create something that would bring out the best of this performance. My mentor Akito Takeuchi said "If you can't keep up with the processing, just use 30 fps processing" but I wanted to make a 60 fps game at all costs, so after much thought I came up with an omnidirectional scrolling method that was suitable for the Famicom and implemented it. As a result, I think I was able to achieve smooth movement for an omni-directional scrolling action game on the Famicom.
This links to Stefan Gancer's interview with Richard Robbins of Sunsoft, which mentions nothing about Madoola nor female protagonists but does clarify something I was wondering about regarding the Java programming language prior to its acquisition by Oracle.
SG: I also was wondering about the name Sunsoft. It is a brand and not a company right?

RR: Sunsoft was a brand name of Sun Denshi and Sun Corporation of America. We had to send a threatening legal letter to Sun Microsystems at the time as they tried to also use Sunsoft for games.

I think the agreement was that Sun Microsystems would not use Sunsoft for games.
EDIT: ndiddy clarified on Discord that Madoola uses 256x256, 64x64, 16x16, and 8x8 layers, unlike Blaster Master that uses 64x64, 32x32, 16x16, and 8x8 layers according to Benjamin Cutler's document. In addition: "both journey to silius and ufouria use the madoola metatile sizes, the only difference is the level got modified to be 4096 x (256 x n) instead of 2048x2048"
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