The Eye of Judgment Collectors Site

Watanabe Interview (April 2nd, 2008)

Intro: Apophis and I set out on an epic task to interview the creator of The Eye of Judgment. Apophis drafted up some very hard hitting question, mostly to do with the future of this game. Out of all the questions Watanabe only was able to answer one question, I was told by Sony that he was very busy working one something and he couldn’t answer any more questions. So take that for whats its worth, there is still hope, barely. But I want to thank Wantanabe for atleast answering one question for my newsletter. Thank you Apophis for the great questions, sorry I couldn’t get any of the other answered. Here it is in its entirety. Enjoy,

EOJCollector.com : Jan 30,2009

Watanabe-san, we are highly pleased to be granted this interview with you. The English-speaking Eye of Judgment community as a whole has several pressing questions about the game, particularly about its future as we believe EoJ has much as yet unfulfilled potential and would definitely like to see EoJ continue for several more sets at least until that potential is fulfilled.

First, with regard to the development process, how did you decide upon some of the crucial tenets of EoJ, particularly the primary win condition of occupying five fields, field bonuses being 2 HP, and only having one type of mana as opposed to requiring different types of mana for creatures of different elements as is the case with many other collectible card games?

When we started developing this title, we aimed to release it at the PS3 launch. With that in mind, it was important for us to take advantage of this opportunity to appeal to a large number of people.

Therefore, we considered the following as the crucial tenets of EOJ:

to include the elements of board games that have been enjoyed by people of all ages for a long time, and

to make the gameplay using the cards as intuitive and simple as possible, considering that all commands could be input by a card image captured by a camera, instead of using a regular game controller.

Based on the above two points, naturally we decided the position and the orientation of the cards to be the keystone of the gameplay. Scrambling for the fields was the best rule that would most enhance the gameplay based on such core elements.

When we created the prototype, all information such as HP, defense, dodge rate, speed, attack, orientation, element, mana cost, affiliation, and special abilities was included in a card as a basic status. That required a long thinking time for both players and AI, which was a big problem. While trying not to spoil the thrill of reading opponent’s moves, such thrill in common with chess and Shogi, we made improvements to the game through a number of test playing, and succeeded to create the game which enabled users to play the game smoothly with the minimum number of elements.