Hi everyone. Kenji Saito here once again.

For this entry, I wanted to talk a little bit about the effects engine in Bayonetta.

Our effects designer, Kudo-san, wrote about effects in his previous blog post, but what you probably didn’t know was that the tools he used to create these effects were actually developed in-house. Moreover, these effects can be created from within the engine while manipulating the game in real-time.

It’s a little hard to explain with words, so please take a look at a real-world example of what I mean.

This video shows creating special effects as we control the character.

So why did we create an environment for real-time effects creation? At PlatinumGames, we use a “crash and build” development style, so things are often changing in the design. To match up with that style, as well as to match with the effect designer’s request that we have an environment where they can quickly check the effects they create, we set-up the in-game effects creation engine. This allowed us to give the effects designers the ability to go about their work in a final game scene-like environment, which in turn allowed them to create high-quality effects in a very productive manner.