Interview with Chensterrain, the creator of Lucky Rabbit Reflex

otome-games.com is launching a series of interviews with otome game developers. We would like to begin with Chensterrain of Studio Super63, the author of one of the most anticipated original English language otome games right now, Lucky Rabbit Reflex.

OG: First - introduction time! Tell us about yourself: do you have any programming or artistic background?

C: Hey, I’m Chensterrain, founder of Studio Super63. I don’t have any sort of programming background, but I’ve been drawing pretty much since I can remember, and was pretty active on DeviantArt up until a couple of years ago, when I started coding Lucky Rabbit Reflex (http://chensterrain.deviantart.com, for anyone curious!).

OG: How did you start working on your own project and what inspired it? Is this your first game?

C: Lucky Rabbit Reflex actually began life as a hobby project I started on a whim back in 2008 – I had just discovered Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side for DS, and though I thought the game was absolutely amazing, only being able to get the vague gist of the Japanese text was more than a little frustrating, so I thought I’d try my hand at making my own dating sim. I’d just finished making a basic Flash dress-up game over at DeviantArt, so I figured making a short dating sim couldn’t be too hard, but after spending a week trying to get my head around actionscript I gave up and discovered the Ren’Py visual novel engine. It was fantastic and exactly what I needed, and Lucky Rabbit Reflex ended up being my first game.

OG: Are you working on it full time?

C: For the most part, I’ve been working on LRR part time; I was at university for the first year and a half or so of development, and recently I’ve been at my day job part-time. I spent about four months working on the game full time after graduation, though, where I probably got more done than in the entire first year!

OG: For those who are not familiar with Lucky Rabbit Reflex, how would you describe the game and why should they be excited about it?

C: Lucky Rabbit Reflex is a dating / life sim – the main character is a seventeen-year old girl switching schools in her final year, and it’s up to the player to find her love, friendship or a decent fashion sense (or all of the above!). As a dating sim in the vein of Tokimeki Memorial, there are five (or more) guys to woo, five girls to befriend, a whole host of side characters and a word count just shy of 180,000 words, so there’s plenty to be getting on with! You can also dress the heroine in a variety of outfits, with more than 150 items of clothing and accessories to choose from, and there are various jobs and clubs to join and places to visit. Overall, I think choice is the most important aspect of the game – alongside choosing what to say and wear, other choices might lead to scenes you might have missed on a prior playthrough. What happens if you play those two friends against one another? Could befriending his sister land you more scenes with that one guy? Would it be awkward if you took him to the place where his sister works? And so on.

Plus, I’m not sure if it’s much of a selling point, but the game is set in the UK – if you’ve ever wanted to play as an Upper Sixth girl sitting her A-levels and dating sarcastic British guys (among others), now’s your chance!

OG: Where does the game's name come from?

C: It was pretty much completely random, really! I decided back when I was about seventeen that it'd make a cool name for a flash dating game if I ever made one, and it kind of stuck. I also briefly considered having a 'Lucky Rabbit Rating' system in the game to tie into the title, where you could access a website to see how much each guy liked you and what you could do to raise his relationship level, but due to time constraints it never made it in, unfortunately!

OG: How long did the game take to develop and what was the biggest hurdle you had to overcome?

C: Lucky Rabbit Reflex took around 2 ½ years to develop – quite a while, considering I was only planning on working on it for a couple of weeks, tops! I think the biggest hurdle I faced was linked to that; after working on the game for around two years, the earliest artwork I’d created wasn’t looking too hot, and certain characters’ personalities had changed over time, meaning I had to redraw / rewrite a lot of the older content. I eventually ended up redrawing almost every CG I’d created back in 2008 and scrapping a number of sprites, outfits and scenes, all of which ate into development time a fair bit. Of course, there comes a point where you have to force yourself to stop redoing everything and focus on creating new content – thankfully, by 2009-10 I’d become more used to this game developing business and the artwork and writing had become pretty consistent.

OG: Is the final version significantly different from your initial concept?

C: For the most part, the final version hasn’t changed much from the initial concept, though there are features in the final game that weren’t introduced until fairly late in development – clothes shopping plays a fairly important role in the game, for example, but I didn’t actually consider adding outfits to the game until around a year into development, and the same goes for the email system.

The main difference ended up being something I scrapped a month after starting development – originally the game was set at a university rather than a secondary school, as I was at uni at the time and I liked the idea of using slightly older characters. In the end, the opening scenes were a little too true to uni life – the main character got her acceptance letter, chose her dorm and had long conversations with other characters about what they were studying and why, etc. etc. – and I decided to scrap the university setting altogether (that, and I didn’t want to draw unique outfits for each character… which I ended up doing anyway, and then some. Whoops!).

OG: The game's art style is quite unique. How did it develop and what are the influences?

C: I’m not really sure, to be honest – I had always considered my art style to be ‘anime’, so I was pretty surprised when people started telling me otherwise! I’d say my main influences are the various artists on DeviantArt I’ve watched over the years, along with a ton of anime-influenced games and comics; I love the ‘European’ animesque style of the Witch comics, for example, and I remember trying pretty unsuccessfully to emulate Shirow Miwa’s (Dogs: Bullets and Carnage) and Akihiko Yoshida’s (Final Fantasy Tactics) styles back in the day.

With Lucky Rabbit Reflex in particular, I was also inspired by Japanese fashion – I’d been living in Japan for the first year of development and suddenly found myself surrounded by sparkly fashion magazines, which I used as the basis for most of the fashion in the game. That, and the Scott Pilgrim comics, where the characters are all ridiculously trendy for some reason.

OG: What kind of games do you play?

C: All sorts, really – I got into visual novels and dating sims with the Tokimeki Memorial series, and when I wasn’t working on Lucky Rabbit Reflex I spent an inordinate amount of time playing Girl’s Side 3rd Story last summer (for, uh, research purposes. Honest!). Other than that, I’ll play any game with likeable characters – I love the Zelda series, especially Wind Waker, Link’s Awakening and Ocarina of Time, and I’ve always had a soft spot for the Tekken series. Getting into game development also led me to try out other indie games for the first time – recently I’ve been playing Hanako Games’ Magical Diary, which is all kinds of awesome.

OG: What are your plans after Lucky Rabbit Reflex gets published? Do you have any other games in the making?

C: While I don’t have anything in production at the minute, I have a few ideas for other games I’d like to make once I’m done with Lucky Rabbit Reflex, especially now that I’ve got to grips with the Ren’Py engine. Hopefully they won’t take anywhere near as long to complete as this one did!

OG: Will the game be released on your own site or do you plan to have it published by a bigger distributor?

C: At the moment, I’m planning to release the game on my own website – I don’t currently have plans to submit it to bigger distributors, but we’ll see!

If you want to learn more about Studio Super63 and the development of Lucky Rabbit Reflex, here's where to go:

Super-Six-Three - Lucky Rabbit Reflex Devblog

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Posts in discussion

Posted: 3 months ago by Soraya #355

Hmmmmmmmmmm, this is a very convincing argument for this game. I might check it out.

Posted: 10 months, 2 weeks ago by Usagi #159

Ooh I'm so excited for this!! I actually saw this earlier a year or so back and to be totally honest I wasn't very interested in it, just because the art style wasn't really my cup of tea, but looking back on it now it's looking really good!!! The guys are really cute, and it's in the same type as the TokiMemo series which is a series I love!!! I'm definitely going to get this when it comes out!! It's sounding like a really fleshed out game, I like it!!

Posted: 10 months, 2 weeks ago by RayRayTea #155

Interesting read, nice to see the game's author has such a broad taste in games (Wind Waker ^.^), comics ("Witch" is created by one of my favourites - Barbucci & Canepa, check out their "Skydoll"!), fashion... and everything else!!

I'm happy the project is nearing completion, I'll probably buy it day one ^.^

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