It’s been a little bit since our last developer interview, and I’m elated to share this one with Mango Factory! They are the passionate team behind Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter. In this interview, Selina and Krittanai reveal what goes into the development process, and the benefits and challenges of creating a character-centric, Kickstarter-backed game — the first we’ve had the pleasure of featuring through this series! Before you read on, don’t forget to give the game a wishlist, and if you’ve able, try out the demo!
1. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer this interview! Could we get an introduction to you and what you do at Mango Factory? (Love the page with the introduction to the team! The Chibis are adorable!)
Selina: I’m Selina Kibara, a Japanese-Colombian storyteller and game designer. I’m the creative lead at Mango Factory and the director of Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter. My job is making sure the game has a firm artistic vision and consistent voice, as well as keeping development on-track! I also created and designed the main cast, and wrote most of the game’s lore and worldbuilding.
Krittanai: I’m Krittanai Supanatsakunchai, a Thai artist known online as GyleToTheRescue, or Gyle. I do a lot of things around here, but my main roles in the team are motion graphic designer and animator. I’m responsible for all the UI and graphic designs, and all the CGs, animated cutscenes and the other 2D animations you’ll be seeing in the game.
2. What is Mango Factory’s founding story?
Selina: Mango Factory is the result of us never letting go of a good idea. Originally founded by myself and two close friends in 2019 to develop an 80s anime stylized JRPG, we worked on that project for about eight months before shelving it due to other commitments.
Then, only a few weeks after officially ending that, the pandemic happened and most of our online friend group got stuck at home. With the extra free time we started conceptualising a Danganronpa fangame, since we were all pretty big fans of the series and it was going through a fandom renaissance at the time, and we put almost two years of work into that before the world opened back up and we needed to get back to commercial projects. Faced with a crossroads, we decided to take our fangame’s story and characters and fuse them with the 80s aesthetic and style of that previous JRPG, and after a lot of tuning that resulted in Kumitantei!
3. Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter features Danganronpa-inspired gameplay but also has features of its own! What unique features can we look forward to?
Selina: The two biggest distinct elements of Kumitantei are the game’s thoroughly integrated card system and the massive amount of traditional 2D animation on display! There’s three types of cards you’ll encounter throughout every segment of the game, being Talent Cards, Evidence Cards, and Debate Cards, and you’ll collect them by bonding with your fellow participants, uncovering clues, and arguing your case in the Clinical Trial. You’ll want to find all of the ones you can to build your deck and uncover new strategies!
Krittanai: The traditional animation is the big thing that gives our game its identity, we’ve worked very hard to develop a unique but period evocative look. The traditional animation is what sells that.
4. The cast of characters are very varied in design! What goes into designing a character for Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter? And do you have a character you are particularly fond of?
Selina: It’s definitely not an exact science! I had planned out every character’s talent and a loose idea of their personality before beginning designing them, but often while mulling over their look I’d end up with a character unrecognizable to the one I’d gone in intending to create. For example, the Technician was originally intended to be an awkward helper while the Comedian would be an antagonistic misanthrope, but these personalities were swapped in the process of designing them. One thing that has stayed true throughout the game’s development however is that Shigure is my Absolute favourite!
5. What game engine is Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter designed on and why?
Selina: It’s developed in Godot Engine, an open-source and royalty-free 3D engine that’s incredibly versatile! Originally we’d begun development in Unity way way back, but in 2023 the engine’s developers announced a very predatory new licensing royalties scheme and we elected to jump ship rather than deal with that nonsense. Since then we’ve been using Godot and never looked back.
6. What aspects of the 1980s inspired Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter?
Selina: Kumitantei’s retro setting and aesthetic are heavily inspired by my experience as a child of Japanese diaspora, I grew up watching bootleg VHS tapes of retro anime from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, often with poorly translated subtitles (if any!). My favourites by far were then and have always been the works of Rumiko Takahashi, especially Urusei Yatsura. When coming into the realm of game development, the thing I wanted to do most of all was create something that emulates the look and feel of the classics I grew up with!
7. In polishing an episodic adventure game like Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter, what part(s) is/are the most time-consuming or challenging?
Krittanai: A great chunk of the time needing to be spent in developing the game is definitely the art assets, especially the CGs and animated cutscenes. Many of the CGs, albeit are mostly static images, contain multiple different drawings within a single scene, some have up to 3-4.
Animated cutscenes on the other hand are fully 2D animated, like an anime, which require lots and LOTS of drawings. One single cut can require multiple frames to be drawn, and those can add up really quickly.
Not to mention the sheer amount of them we decided to have. Just within the Prologue and Episode 1 alone, we’ve already made nearly forty different CGs and cutscenes combined. And each of them tends to contain a lot more than a single image, so you can imagine how many drawings have been made. It’s a very challenging and time-consuming process, but it’s what gives our game its identity and makes it stand out from other games similar to it.
8. As a game that began on Kickstarter, (and our first Kickstarter game to be interviewed to date), what do you think are the benefits or challenges in pitching a game through a crowdfunding site?
Selina: The greatest benefit is the ability to connect directly with your audience and know that the game you’re making is something that players genuinely want to play! It’s so fickle to guess what people want when conceptualizing a game, but crowdfunding gives you a chance to see whether or not players are interested in your pitch from the get-go.
The greatest challenge with crowdfunding is knowing what you can promise from what you can’t. For a lot of creative people, myself included, we have very grandiose visions of what we want our projects to be and who we want involved and how big and monumental the finished work is gonna be, but that’s what kills stuff like this. Setting realistic expectations and achievable goals is what separates crowdfunding successes from disasters, and so far we’ve been very fortunate in steering clear of that.
9. Do you have any tips for playing through the game?Selina: The core theme of Kumitantei is empathy, the innate human ability to emotionally understand and connect with each other. Applying that is the key to completing this game.
Also, if you’re supposed to be going somewhere specific during the story and see a couple of the other students standing around in the hallway, definitely go interact with them! Some of the funniest written exchanges in the game are optional dialogue, you won’t want to miss them.
10. Where can we subscribe to the progress and news about Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter?
Selina: Aside from checking our website and wishlisting on Steam, the best way to keep up-to-date on what we’re doing is visiting our official Discord server! We have a lovely and passionate community there, and we share new updates and host events very regularly. We’ve also got a YouTube channel, TikTok, Twitter, and Bluesky that all get frequent updates and fun content related to Kumitantei, please follow us! Thank you!
Thank you so much to Selina and Krittanai for the lovely interview! If you are a developer looking to get the word out about your game, I am always happy to feature upcoming games! Please drop me an email at himetokki@gmail.com to arrange livestream and/or interview features!