Today we continue the interview with Kenta Cho from ABA Games where we discuss some of his favorite games and programming languages as well as if he will try to get his games out to a larger audience. Kenta Cho makes games for the sake of making games, not for the sake of getting rich. If more people looked at it that way then maybe, just maybe we might have more games that are a lot more fun to play and take much less time to create.

"As for a console I like Xbox 360 games, especially small good games in Xbox live arcade such as Geometry Wars, Pinball FX and PAC-MAN CE." -Kenta Cho

[SG]: Do you have someone helping with graphics and concepts or are you
the whole package?

[KC]:  I do all things related to my games such as game designs, graphics, sounds and codes. I like to do it all myself because it becomes difficult to try many ideas in a short term if I create a game with a team. I feel special when I complete creation of a full game by myself.

[SG]: I notice a variety of other platforms and languages on the website.
What is your favorite? Which do you feel is the easiest to work on?

[KC]: My favorite is a little-known gaming hardware P/ECE released only in Japan. It is unbalanced hardware that has a very powerful CPU and a poor graphics screen. The screen has only 128x88 4-level grayscale pixels. But since it has a very simple API to handle these pixels, we can do anything to control graphics on these pixels such as particle animations and 3D rendering. Recently these algorithms are encapsulated into complicated libraries generally, but when creating games on portable gaming devices, we still have some opportunities to implement these mechanisms. It is fun to re-invent such mechanisms and good training to understand the mechanism of libraries.

Recently I'm mainly using Flash 9 and XNA. Flash is easy, not only for a designer, but also for a programmer from version 9 since it has a very powerful object-oriented language, ActionScript 3.0. I like a web-based platform such as Flash because that requires no installation. One downside of Flash is it doesn't support a joystick. I really long for support of a joystick for Flash player or Adobe AIR.

XNA is a great environment to use cutting-edge technologies such as C# and HLSL, but I think it is not so easy to use for creating a simple game.
 

[SG]: Do you have any other games that you are in development on now?

[KC]: Recently I have been trying to realize a simple editor with which anyone can create their own shmup. There are already some tools that support creating shmups, but I think these tools are still too complicated. There should be a simple but still flexible GUI editor for creating patterns of barrage, enemies and stages. I can't be certain I can realize such
an editor but I started creating some prototypes in Flash.

[SG]: Are you an everyday gamer? If so, what is your favorite genre, game, platform?

[KC]: Of course I like to play a shmup, and mainly I play it in an arcade. In Japan a few shmups are still released every year as an arcade video game and their qualities are very good. At the present time Raiden4 is my favorite one. As for a console I like Xbox 360 games, especially small good games in Xbox live arcade such as Geometry Wars, Pinball FX and PAC-MAN CE.

[SG]: Finally, any plans to get your games distributed through any on the new console based services like the Wii Virtual Console, Xbox Live or Sony Network? I think there are many people who would really enjoy your games.

[KC]:   I think it would be very good if my games could be played on the consoles. But I think my games are too simple to release as a commercial product even if for an online distributed game. So I may need help from some people to improve the quality of the game.

 With recent announcements like WiiWare from Microsoft and XNA from Microsoft maybe a Kenta Cho game will be coming to a console near you soon. It seems to me that his games have the potential to be more popular than he thinks, after all Majesco just announced a game that sounds very much like Tumiki Fighters coupled with Kenta's attempts to make "a simple editor with which anyone can create their own shmup." I look forward to seeing more games from Kenta Cho and I hope they show up on the consoles. I would really like to play Parsec47 or Tumiki Fighters with a controller or the Wiimote.

For more information on Kenta Cho and ABA Games visit the website .

Tak čau!

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