I did an article on Hiroyuki Owaku a while ago, but Firecrest did a bit more research to find out what Owaku has been doing since Silent Hill…
As most of you may know, Hiroyuki Owaku was best known for his work as the scenario writer for Silent Hill 2 and 3. He was later credited as the co-story writer for the original Silent Hill, and also worked as an enemy programmer. After SH3, he is credited to writing the original lyrics for the Silent Hill 4 -The Room- OST. He went on to write the stories for Silent Hill Cage of Cradle and Silent Hill Double under Dusk: two mobile-based Silent Hill manga that was only released in Japan.
I personally don’t know what Owaku is doing nowadays, but I thought I would shed some light on what he had been doing since he left the Silent Hill world.
In early 2007, Konami came up with an original concept to develop an online RPG game. This game was called “Chaotic Eden”, and Hiroyuki Owaku was appointed Director along with Kiyohiko Yamane of Suikoden II fame as Producer.
It was a step in a new direction for Konami as they had been focused mostly on console-based games and it was their first shot at trying the online gaming industry. It was decided early on that the South Korean market would be the initial primary target as Japan wasn’t too big on online games at the time, but in constrast the South Korean market had a huge online gaming industry, so it was important for them to be successful in that market. (Think Dragonball Online.)
At the time, Japanese game companies had very limited experience with developing online games, and even more limited knowledge of the South Korean online gaming industry, so Konami sought out a partner to co-develop this project and decided on Korean-based Uniana. Co-development started early summer of that same year.
“Chaotic Eden” had several system features that made it unique from the usual Japanese turn-based RPGs at the time. The game world consisted of two worlds with five villages each, where each of the villages contained 20 “official” dungeons. The main feature, however, was to allow the players to build and customize their own personal dungeons with the items that they acquired through the game. Also, instead of focusing on the traditional character “level-up” system, they focused more on the collecting and strengthening of individual items.
The turn-based system was also tailored to be more roguelike, which allowed features such as battle damage being closely registered in real-time and also the player character starving to death if he doesn’t eat accordingly.
Owaku’s job as Director along with Yamane was also to communicate with the Korean-based partner company to ensure that both parties had equal say in the project. Konami’s focus was on planning, original concept and story, and sound while Uniana’s focus was on client programming, 3D graphics, and server setup.
Not sure how exactly this project turned out, though my impression is that it may have tanked. You can try searching online for “Chaotic Eden” and you may get a few hits. Because this was a collaboration project, it was hardly known outside of those two countries, and even then, it seems the public reception was lukewarm.
Anyway, that was what Owaku was doing in 2007. Click on the source links below (in Korean) to see Owaku looking cool (toward the bottom). Who would have thought a horror scenario writer would be working on an online dungeon RPG? (But then again he worked on planning and scenario for “Busou Shinki”, so I guess there are stranger things…)
Read the rest here.
