Development New SEGA Recruitment Page Interview Sheds New Light on Sonic Frontiers Development

[nuckles87]

In a new interview posted on SEGA of Japan's recruitment page, members of Sonic Frontiers' development team have shed new light on the game's production, including the true size of the team at the height of the game's development.

The interviewees include Sub-Lead Planner Masaya Hirano, Field/Environmental/Background Artist Yuki Takahashi, and Puzzle Lead Programmer Yuki Mitsuishi. This interview is in Japanese, a language I can't speak, so I did obviously run it through some AI translation. In addition to the Google translation people are currently using on Twitter, I also went ahead and ran it through DeepL.

To start, the interview gave us a better idea of the size and structure of Sonic Frontiers' development team. While the team size is often cited as just 60 people, in reality the dev team reached a max size of 20 planners and 120 developers at one point, with the latter including designers, programmers, sound engineers, and 25 background designers. Technically, it's long been known that more than 60 people worked on the game, but this seems to be our first hard confirmation on how many people were working on the game concurrently.

 Developers and designers were also divided into several teams. Developers were divided by the kind of gameplay they were working on. For instance, the puzzles had their own team, led by the aforementioned Yuki Mitsuishi. The background artists were, likewise, divided into teams, with a "Ruins Team," Rock Team," and "Plant Team" given as examples. This was a first for Sonic Team.

The interview also went into Sonic Frontiers' early growing pains. A year into the game's five year development cycle, the game's prototype was not yet at a satisfactory level in terms of graphics or game play, according to Takahashi. Originally, the open zone gameplay centered around solving puzzles, and the open zone prototype was three times the size of Kronos. But the prototype lacked a sense of speed and in Takahashi's words "didn't feel like a Sonic game." Hirano said "the team was too focused on the puzzle solving gameplay."

For Hirano, things began to take off when a young developer who had only been at SEGA for three years suggested a "grind rail generator" gimmick. While the interview doesn't directly state it, this is presumably referring to the grind rails that would appear across the open zone as puzzles are completed. They then made a big change to how they were designing the open zone in order to lead the player to solve puzzles and battle while having fun moving through the world.

Many also felt the island was boring because it was a wide expanse of similar scenery, so the background design was revisited and given a major overhaul. They wanted open zone environments to look natural and realistic from every angle, while also adding locations and exciting points that would not bore players. To that end, they created the aforementioned background artist teams.

Finally, the interview also goes into the game's repeat playtesting. Many of you may remember that Sonic Frontiers was first leaked as "Sonic Rangers" from someone who claimed to have playtested it. It would seem Sonic Team did indeed conduct numerous playtests in the US, the feedback from which they repeatedly reworked the game. Initial playtest scores were low, but these increased overtime until they were finally getting 8s and 9s. This led to a feeling within the team that "we can do this." Notably, while Sonic Team has done playtesting before, Takahashi confirmed that this was the first time Sonic Team took the approach of making improvements through repeated playtesting.

This interview may have been primarily to attract potential employees, but it does give us some interesting details about Frontiers itself, particularly in terms of things that were new for Sonic Team. Again, you can find the whole interview here. 

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[Aroon]

Cool early development Sonic Frontiers teams has until begin becoming great Sonic Frontiers teams at the end Frontiers game into our hands it’s right deliver.

[Rabbitearsblog]

So, say that Sonic Frontiers did fail.  Would that have meant that the people working in Sonic Team would have been replaced or would SEGA have stopped making games for the franchise for a few years?

[Polkadi~☆]

2 hours ago, Rabbitearsblog said:

So, say that Sonic Frontiers did fail.  Would that have meant that the people working in Sonic Team would have been replaced or would SEGA have stopped making games for the franchise for a few years?

No, Sonic Team won't ever truly die, as long as Sonic remains a profitable mascot for SEGA, which he does anyway. But it has been expressed time and time again that SEGA would not have allowed Sonic Team to take any risks in game design or have a higher development budget again. Sonic Team would be made to only create games that SEGA's investors would approve of, which would be the complete opposite of the Sonic Team from the Saturn/Dreamcast era that made whatever they felt like.

[JezMM]

16 hours ago, Rabbitearsblog said:

So, say that Sonic Frontiers did fail.  Would that have meant that the people working in Sonic Team would have been replaced or would SEGA have stopped making games for the franchise for a few years?

I think people are blowing the quote out of proportion - I doubt they'd allow something as confidential as "Sonic Team would be dismantled or the Sonic franchise would have been put on hold if this game failed" in a little developer interview like this.

I interpret the line as simply reflecting the developer's desperation or determination.  Like, Sonic has flopped at trying so many new things that simply for his reputation they can't afford to not stick the landing on this new angle.  If they've made the decision to pivot from "safe" modern Sonic games like Sonic Forces, it can't be a wonky "good enough" experiment that doesn't make a splash like Lost World again, it NEEDS to be significant and worthwhile so they had to get it to that point or there was no point doing it at all, etc.  Luckily they just about made it there, by a good majority of people's feelings.

[SadVlad]

I hope whoever came up with the grind rail generator got paid well after it was all said and done, because SEGA definitely went to town several times on one tank of gas with that. If he got paid a dollar for every grind rail in that game, he could retire today.

On 2/29/2024 at 10:06 PM, Rabbitearsblog said:

So, say that Sonic Frontiers did fail.  Would that have meant that the people working in Sonic Team would have been replaced or would SEGA have stopped making games for the franchise for a few years?

From what I've been hearing, SEGA is having layoffs right now unfortunately...

[Rabbitearsblog]

13 hours ago, SadVlad said:

From what I've been hearing, SEGA is having layoffs right now unfortunately...

This is apparently happening with most of the gaming companies as of late....