Armed Fantasia Nov/Dec ’23 Update

Another month has come and gone as we inch closer to the end of the year. Wild Bunch Productions and bee tribe Digital Studio combined the November and December updates into one. In this update for Armed Fantasia To The End Of The Wilderness, we get information about the development and even some cool images. So let’s get into the update!

The team started with a short message. This is what they said:

All of a sudden, the days have gotten shorter, and we can feel the temperature difference with our bodies more and more as time goes on. We hope you’re all in good health. A main staff member will be bringing you this month’s report instead of Kaneko.

November 2023 Project Diary

Ishii the chief director for Armed Fantasia had this to say:

Hello, everyone. I’m Ishii, the chief director of Armed Fantasia. We’re working hard to reach our monthly development goals, but since the people sitting diagonally to the right of me and directly in front of me are very busy working to complete the goals that are due by the end of this year, and I “look less busy by comparison,” I’m going to write this month’s report.

Towns, Dungeons, and Battles

One of the things they shared with fans was some insight into the development of the Towns, Dungeons, and Battles for Armed Fantasia:

We’re working on brushing up Lostave, the town where Ingram’s childhood home is while aiming to complete our end-of-the-year goals. More and more work is being done on the landscapes, so the resolution of the world is increasing with every new day. Regarding Lostave… It’s a place where people who excavate massive ruins end up gathering and turning into a sort of settlement at some point, making it a town that embodies the Western-punk characteristics of Armed Fantasia. The combination of Western-style buildings and giant mining machines makes it unique.

It’s sad that we can only show it to you through text rather than images at this moment, but I think the visuals we’re working on are going to be pretty exciting, so I hope you’re all looking forward to it. Battles in Armed Fantasia have a ton of elements to them, so we’ve been doing a lot of trial and error regarding the UI and what to keep vs. what to exclude. Thanks to all our hard work, we’re finally seeing the light in the tunnel. In addition to that, Kaneko’s sense of aesthetics says that the text info should be as large as possible, which has caused our UI people to work very hard.

Main Scenario

In regards to the main scenario, a lot of information wasn’t provided. This was the only update fans got:

As I mentioned earlier, the two people in charge of this are very busy. Sometimes I hear them saying inappropriate things, such as “It’s a battle so big it’ll change the entire landscape,” which makes me fear for what’s yet to come. They aren’t thinking about the future at all. As far as work status goes, things are still being written. But the progress is going well, and Kaneko has started working on scenes for the last dungeon.

Storyboards

Ishii talked in length about the “storyboards” for Armed Fantasia To The End Of The Wilderness. He went into detail by saying:

That isn’t enough text to make for a proper update, however, so this time I’d like to try and explain how I go about creating storyboards. First I thoroughly read the scenario, then pick up several points based on the images that surfaced in my head. Then, based on that, I stare intently at the background documents, thinking of cuts that will tie everything together and create the scenes. As for the actual work, the length can be adjusted, but no detailed editing work needs to be done, so the composition mostly gets decided based on the storyboard alone.

If you want information on various direction techniques, it might be better to read technical books on the subject. I think that as long as I prioritize my focus on what the scene is supposed to convey to the player, everything more or less comes to me. Game event storyboards are more lenient when it comes to length compared to anime or movie storyboards, but there are a lot of things that can’t be created easily due to asset problems, so having a bit of knowledge regarding game production can help there.

Difficulties of Scenarios and Storyboards

Then, Ishii went into more detail about the difficulties of development for the Armed Fantasia scenarios and storyboards:

The real difficulty regarding transforming Kaneko’s scenarios into storyboards is that every scene has a lot of content to them. All of the elements are interesting of course…they’re just very dense, I suppose would be the right word. Whenever I try to put everything together, I get lots of images in my head, but they sometimes end up being too costly, and so on and so forth. I spend a lot of time racking my brains trying to figure out what to cut and what to keep in order to turn it into an amount of work that the designers can actually handle. 

When things get to be too much, I go to Kaneko and ask him something like “What do you think about…(cutting a specific piece of content)?” In most cases, he either says “Hmm… But it’s entertaining, isn’t it?” or “It’s good, though,” and I end up having to go back to my seat and stare up at the ceiling. Just the other day, we had a conversation like that regarding a certain scene in the prologue. If you try to think about what it was like before the scene was finally created or how it was originally written as you play the game, my hard work may yet be rewarded. Incidentally, whenever Kaneko’s name is credited for scenario writing, he properly checks every element of the art related to the scenario outside of the storyboards as well.

Arms and Anomalies Designs

Next on the agenda, Ishii talked some about the Arms and Anomalies designs for Armed Fantasia. We even got a couple of images shared with us and Ishii had this to say:

We’ve finished all the designs for the weapons used by both enemies and allies. In this game, excluding the incredible energy source known as the Lacrima Drive, the weapons all have rather secure constructions to them, which makes us want exact scale props.

This month, we’re revealing the elephant to you. Its name is Grootslang. Cute, isn’t it? Children love it. Honestly, it actually took us quite a bit of effort to hone in on the right image for Grootslang. With elephants, the form alone makes it look like an elephant, so I remember only ending up with nothing but an elephant and cradling my head in my hands in front of the order for a while. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts when you actually run into this kaiju in-game.

That concludes this month’s report. There’s only one month left of this year. So we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for continuing to cheer Armed Fantasia on for the rest of 2023.

Wrap-Up

Now this update wasn’t as lengthy as its counterpart from the Double Kickstarter Penny Blood. Even with that being said we can always appreciate when the developers go into some detail about their development process. Fans also enjoy the fact they continue to share different images related to Armed Fantasia. As we close out 2023 I believe we are ending on a high note for this game. I can’t wait for it to be released and see what the future holds.