HIYA Fighters!
First things first - huge thanks to people who wishlisted the game and/or backed the Kickstarter, you guys are awesome. Developing Okinawa Rush has been a long but joyous journey and now we’re finally at the finish line and it feels so rewarding.
Plotting the course
Ok but enough of getting side-tracked. Before Okinawa Rush was even a fully formed idea, I knew that it needed a solid story. I think that in this type of game you need to have something driving you forward to progress through the levels and it can’t just be the want to finish it. That’s why right off the bat, you have a compelling reason for revenge, a clear villain in the Black Mantis Clan, and an interesting setting to explore. Then as the plot unravels it leaves you wanting more, which keeps you playing, even when the game gets hard, and when you get through that part where you died 100 times already, you get a moment to breathe and put down the controller. Your prize is here. The cutscene.
Pen. Paper. Cutscene!
Okinawa Rush has many cutscenes to discover, all hand-drawn and designed by my brother David. We really wanted to capture that magic of cinematics in old games, that rewarded you for beating some really difficult, skill-based part. But making cutscenes, as we have found out, is a lot of hard work. OR has 3 different characters, each with a different storyline, and each with 3 different endings. That’s a lot of ground to cover. We had to really get our noggins jogging to figure out how to connect everything to the Black Mantis clan in a way that makes sense and makes for an engaging story. For that, we first made some simple storyboards, then grabbed a pen and paper and made some better, more detailed sketches. Afterward, we used a lot of these sketches as guides to create the carefully crafted pixel art cutscenes you can see today.
Setting yourself apart
The cutscenes are great at keeping the player engaged in the game but the game has to be interesting and fun to play, to begin with. We’ve talked a little about how we crafted the OR gameplay so let’s focus on the “interesting” part now. The setting of Okinawa Rush, as the title might hint, is a fictional, parallel-history version of Okinawa. In this world magic is real and so are the monsters. I was set on Okinawa as the setting from the start because of my interest in traditional martial arts, and specifically - karate. Karate has originated from Okinawa when the island banned all the weapons, and that tidbit of information stuck with me and prompted me to read more into the topic. We draw a lot on Okinawan and Japanese history in how we design the buildings and landscapes, and on mythology for the supernatural elements. That does not mean that we’re trying to give you an authentic Okinawan experience, far from it - we actually decided not to give the setting a precise date so as not to prompt people into connecting it with the real world. We mix and match elements from many inspirations, be it old Amiga games, mythology, or a random bird that just flew past my window. What if Shin could fly? Hmmm...
Ok, I’m getting distracted, I think it’s time to stop writing. Stay tuned for more devlogs though! In the meantime, if you have any questions, leave a comment below. If you’re itching to try the game, check out our demo. When you’re done drop a comment below with your impressions! We really appreciate all the feedback.
Until next time, brave warriors!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/777670/Okinawa_Rush/