With Momotaro Dentetsu World, Konami brings a beloved 36-year-old franchise to Unity

Momotaro Dentetsu is an iconic Japanese franchise featuring boardgame-style play where players travel to acquire properties and build wealth. The first game in this beloved series was released in 1988, and more than 20 titles have been added since.

Momotaro Dentetsu World, the latest iteration in the franchise, was released a little over a year ago. It was the first Momotaro Dentetsu console game made with Unity, so we sat down with Noriaki Okamura, the senior producer of the franchise for Konami Digital Entertainment. In this Q&A, he explains why they brought their game to Unity to, as he puts it, “pass this franchise on to the creators of the future.”

Why did you want to add another development team to this game series?

To pass on the Momotaro Dentetsu franchise to the next generation of developers. The first Momotaro Dentetsu game was released in 1988. Since then, we have released more than 20 works in about 35 years. Of course, the fundamentals such as game systems and game balance are well established, and we’ve used these fundamentals to create new titles. It’s the “secret recipe” of the franchise.

It was Mr. Sakuma, the original creator, who developed the secret recipe over the years. As the game creator, Mr. Sakuma has spent a huge amount of time creating each game based on a secret recipe of his own making, repeating detailed adjustments each time, and that’s the development style of the classic series.

But even if there’s a secret recipe, the same quality can’t necessarily be guaranteed if creators other than Mr. Sakuma imitate this approach. For this reason, we felt we needed to establish a development team that could produce titles in the Momotaro Dentetsu franchise, consisting mainly of young developers who would be the next generation of leaders in the franchise, without being dependent on Mr. Sakuma.

The director of Momotaro Dentetsu World is Mr. Shoji Masuda, who worked as assistant supervisor on the classic series for many years. Mr. Masuda is a veteran game creator who said that he took on directing this title to unpack the classic series’ development methods and hand them over to younger creators.

In other words, Momotaro Dentetsu World passes on the secret recipe that Mr. Sakuma created over its 35-year history to the next generation of creators, to rebuild the secret recipe in them so that the franchise can continue 30 or 50 years into the future.

Momotaro Dentetsu World is the first console game title to be developed using Unity. Why did you decide to use Unity?

Looking to the future, I felt that we needed a development environment that would be easy for anyone to create in. I also wanted to create the game in a game engine so that it would be easier to port to a variety of platforms.

For example, right now there are no plans to develop a mobile app version of Momotaro Dentetsu World, but since it’s being developed in Unity, it could be released in the future without significant resources. So I think if we were to consider developing the mobile app version, it would also lower the decision barrier for us.

Please tell us about any Unity features that you have particularly used or found useful in your production.

The first thing I can mention is ScriptableObjects. Adding this feature to the database has made it much easier to manage large numbers of assets, such as stations and cards, and the parameters associated with them.

The next one that comes to mind is the C# Job System. The game has a magnifying glass function that allows the player to see detailed information about each station. When the player uses this function, many objects are projected onto the screen, and this caused a high rendering load, which was a concern. So we implemented multi-threaded code for this game using the C# Job System to stabilize the frame rate.

We also benefited from the fact that Unity allows detailed animation settings using ST values for material colors and textures, so we were able to express the sea as we imagined it at a low cost.

Others that helped us save time were the capability to access the model being previewed, extract the FBX, import it into Maya, and adjust its position and size in Maya, as well as the capability to preview and instantly review the prefab as it was being created.

Looking back on the production of this work, what were the advantages of using Unity?

I think the advantage of Unity is that it is widely used by many developers. Most of the staff working on this project had experience in Unity development in the past, so it was a great advantage that we could communicate with them very easily.

Now that Momotaro Dentetsu can be developed with Unity, you can flexibly develop various publications in the future, right?

Yes. This franchise has a long history. As mentioned earlier, the first title in the franchise was released in 1988, so the secret recipe passed down from generation to generation is not even developed in C++, but in C.

We have created franchise titles while utilizing and improving upon this secret recipe, and now we have chosen to break down and port it to Unity. The reasons for this and the benefits are as I have explained, but we don't believe that we have yet built a robust system that can be utilized even 50 years from now.