created the concept for
Gravity Rush and would be its director and co-writer. The initial concept for
Gravity Rush came to
Keiichiro Toyama during the beginning of his video game career when he joined
Konami. His initial idea was a vague image of people floating in space, with later concepts and ideas forming over time. Due to his work first at Konami as director for
Silent Hill, Toyama was labelled as a
horror game director, leading him to work for
Sony Computer Entertainment on the
Siren series working out of the company's
Japan Studio development team. As
Siren: Blood Curse was nearing completion, and noting the combination of increasing costs and decreasing revenue for horror games, Toyama decided to prove his ability to design outside the horror genre and turn his concept for
Gravity Rush into a video game. Toyama pitched
Gravity Rush to Sony in April 2008 as a "gravity action" game for the
PlayStation 3 (PS3) under the title
Gravité. It was a title aimed at hardcore gamers which would be expanded with
downloadable content (DLC). The main staff were made up of veterans of Toyama's
Siren series. Full production began following the completion of
Siren: Blood Curse in mid-2008. When creating the project, the team combined the concepts of gravity manipulation and a protagonist flying through the air, with the gameplay being inspired by Toyama's experience with the
Sixaxis wireless controller prior to the PS3's retail release. When creating the first prototype, the team used character models from
Siren: Blood Curse to test the gravity-based physics. Development on the PS3 version ran between 2008 and 2009, with a concept video to help the team finalize the art style and gameplay being put together using
Autodesk Maya during 2008. The team were implementing the Sixaxis controller as part of the gameplay. During 2009, Toyama received information about the Vita—then in development and known internally as "Next Gen Portable"—so he could test its capabilities. Impressed by the
Vita's gyroscope system and its potential application to the gravity-based action of
Gravity Rush, and further encouraged by
SCE Worldwide Studios president
Shuhei Yoshida, Toyama decided to shift development to the Vita. When the project was being designed for PS3, the team felt confident they could match their concept video as the console had been out for two years prior to
Gravity Rush beginning development, the team saw and encountered little difficulty working with the established hardware. The main issues faced by the team were the size of the game world, the amount of content, and how to program the game. When development shifted to the Vita, which was still in development and had no set hardware specifications, the staff size dropped and the team had to reassess their priorities as they needed to help demonstrate the platform's unique features with the game. Initially the Vita was expected to have similar capabilities to the PS3, allowing the team to carry over their previous development experience. When they realized that the Vita had far less power than the PS3, they needed to reassess the project, leading to their previous work being scrapped. Difficulties with the Vita's still-fluctuating hardware specifications during the first year of development forced Project Siren to develop the game on
Microsoft Windows personal computers, a rarity for first-party Sony developers. By January 2011, the game was running on the Vita hardware and the team focused on polishing the graphics and gameplay. The pressure to create a first-party Vita title in time for the platform's year of release put a large burden on the development team. A moment Toyama remembered later was when the Vita was publicly revealed, which saw
Gravity Rush announced as part of the platform's launch line-up; due to the game suffering from unresolved
frame rate problems, Toyama felt anxious about completing the game.
Design Toyama's greatest inspiration on the gameplay of
Gravity Rush was
Crackdown, influencing the upgrade system and open world. During early stages, the team contemplated giving players safe areas within which the gravity manipulation would play out similar to a puzzle, but test player feedback led to the gravity-based navigation being applied to an open world. The team discarded the concept of fall damage. Toyama had the team watch the film
Hancock as a reference for Kat's "sluggish" movement through the air. The lack of a targeting reticle or automated aiming was included partially to focus player attention on the Vita's gyroscope functions and to prevent the game from being too easy. The touchscreen controls were intended to play a larger role in combat, but Toyama found the result more difficult to control and so restricted it to dodging. The map design, which used a simple 2D design, was meant to ease navigation for players exploring the city from above using Kat's powers. The most difficult gameplay move for the team was the Gravity Slide. The decision to have an open world town caused the gravity manipulation mechanic to become the basis of nearly all gameplay elements. During early testing, the team created small test areas such as enclosed rooms and tunnels, first determining what cues to give players about which was up and down when manipulating gravity. To this end, they included flying vehicles, distinct architectural styles with clear tops and bottoms, and other elements such as the movements of people and how Kat's clothing behaves. A major issue with the gameplay was ensuring the environments had proper
collision detection; while most games had multiple inaccessible areas which lacked collision detection, the gravity mechanic meant that the player could navigate a larger number of surfaces in the game, necessitating increased focus on ensuring collision detection for all surfaces worked as intended. During this period, the team used
Havok software when testing both collision and the behavior of destructible elements. Kat's moveset during her navigation and combat used a combination of hand-animated and physics-based movements. The game used Sony's in-house
PhyreEngine. The game was designed to run consistently at 30 frames per second, with lower resolution graphics being used to allow both a consistent frame rate and quicker loading for environments. The team worked with Sony to create several graphical tricks, such as false reflections from character eyes during real-time cutscenes and transparent elements in the scenery, to keep the frame rate high while not compromising the game's graphical quality. The final game featured 300,000 polygons per frame, sitting between the standard polygon counts of the
PlayStation 2 and the PS3; including shadow elements and other aspects, the polygon count expanded to the point that the team feared they could not maintain a steady frame rate. In response, they devises a type of polygon culling where graphics hidden by other nearer objects had their polygon count greatly decreased, with separate layers of culling for both the in-game camera perspective and its peripheral area, which was further enhanced using the game's
ambient occlusion. A version of this system was also applied to the lighting engine, controlling where light and shadow effects needed to be during movement through the environment. Due to the game's graphics and its platform limitations, a special
shader system was used for character model lighting so as to preserve both realistic lighting and the
cel shaded graphics. Another unique shader was used for the game's pickups, giving them a translucent quality. The result enabled graphical quality comparable to the PS3, as the culling and shader technology worked around the Vita's hardware limitations.
Scenario and art The scenario was written by Naoko Sato. The basic story and the script for some scenes were written by Toyama. The central story concept of two rival characters with similar superpowers was taken from comic books of the 1970s, with Toyama comparing the scenario to
Hancock,
The Bionic Woman and
Majokko Megu-chan. The shift to Vita and the consideration of the game's Western market drastically impacted the game's story and presentation. To appeal to as broad a market as possible, the narrative and presentation were modeled after both Japanese anime and Western
comic book narratives, in addition to the comic book influences. Despite being a direct shift from the dark tone of the
Siren series, Toyama used the similar premise of a protagonist getting involved in a crisis in a strange town. The world's fictional language was seen as another potential problem when appealing to the Western market. A central theme in the story was Kat's growth as a character through her hardships, acting as a metaphor and medium for commentary on the modern class system and examining a stagnating world system. The Japanese title
Gravity Daze was designed to both communicate the game's gravity-based premise and give an impression of strangeness. The long subtitle was meant to be impressive, with Toyama using the subtitle for
Dr. Strangelove for inspiration. Due to production deadlines, the team had to cut much of the intended later narrative. Toyama based the main protagonist on characters from American comic books such as
Batman. The choice of a female protagonist proved difficult to implement, as research at the time showed games with female leads selling less in the West. Kat's personality was based on Toyama's own view of the world and ways of talking with people. Kat's young age factored into this; while young protagonists were a norm in Japan partially due to the culture of purity surrounding them, in the West having a young protagonist was contentious for multiple reasons. After consulting with Western Sony staff, it was decided to keep the female Kat as the main protagonist, with Sato designing Kat so she would appeal to a wide audience. To make Kat more appealing, Sato chose simple and well-known story tropes for Kat's storyline—such as her amnesia, solving a central mystery, and helping Hekseville's people—in addition to allowing players to hear Kat's inner thoughts during conversations and story cutscenes. Sato greatly decreased the amount of violence from the first draft while preserving the meaning of story scenes. A cited example of this was a scene where Sid came upon Kat bathing; while in the game Sid slipped and fell, in the original draft Kat would have kicked him, a style of physical humor common in Japanese anime but seen as unpopular overseas. The Nevi were designed to combine geometric shapes with the "feeling of life". The minor characters of Kat's cat and Raven's crow companions were intended to evoke history through their appearance and lack of expressive features. The art director for
Gravity Rush was Yoshiaki Yamaguchi, who had previously worked on the
Siren series. Yamaguchi created the initial drafts of the game's planned female protagonist before Kat was created. When creating the town of Hekseville, Yamaguchi drew directly from comics, using line drawing to exaggerate building outlines and choosing unusual environmental colors. The core concept for the game's environments was "Living Background", presenting the game's comic book influences within a moving background. The effect was created using multiple shaders and different environmental effect layers. The process was draining for the relatively small team assigned with creating the graphics. The main characters were designed by Shunsuke Saito. Kat's design reflected the wish to appeal to Western players; her proportions, face and hair were more realistic than what many expected of Japanese character designs. The key words for Kat's design were "
ninja", "strong woman" and "unknown nationality". Kat went through multiple drafts, with her final design meant to have no exact origin and hold an exotic quality similar to popular female game heroine
Lara Croft. Enemy designs were by Takeshi Oga, while NPC designs are being handled by Yukiko Itano. The game's concept and cover art were created by Oga. When creating the cover art, Oga worked to convey the setting and gameplay elements of
Gravity Rush. The style and cel shaded graphics of
Gravity Rush was influenced by
Franco-Belgian comics, with Toyama citing artists
Jean Giraud and
Enki Bilal as direct inspiration. The choice allowed a combination of realism and fantastic elements that Yamaguchi felt was unique to the style. Another influence on the world design was the film
The Fifth Element. The concept of
Gravity Rush stemmed from a scene from
The Incal, a graphic novel series illustrated by Giraud; several scenes showed characters falling through space, scenes which Toyama later emulated within
Gravity Rush. The world's culture was based on modern-day cities, while the buildings and streets of Hekseville were based on towns and cities from
Northern and
Eastern Europe, combining old buildings with modern transport. Specific influences were the cities of
Copenhagen and
Amsterdam. Its design began with the World Pillar being at its center, then the rest of the city grew around it around the concept of a fixed time period for the whole city to allow for the creation of interesting locations. The game's spoken dialogue used a constructed language which sounded similar to French; Toyama created the language based on Giraud's bande dessinée work and his observations that Japanese dubs of French movies felt "natural". A constructed writing system, made mainly from English and romanized Japanese with letters removed in certain positions, was used for maps, in-world signage, and visual sound effects.
Music The music was composed by
Kohei Tanaka, noted for his work both in anime and on video games such as the
Sakura Wars series and
Resonance of Fate. Arrangements were done by Tanaka,
Keiji Inai and Yasuhisa Murase. Tanaka was brought on board the project as Toyama felt Tanaka was the only one who could recall the orchestral melodies of animations from the 1970s. Similar to his work on the
Sakura Wars series, Tanaka began working on the soundtrack from early on in development, resulting in Tanaka's work influencing the development of gameplay. Tanaka used a mixture of acoustic orchestra, electric guitar and bass, drums, and saxophone; in addition, he used a Synthesound board to create more experimental sounds. Rather than sticking to a single musical genre, Tanaka mixed genres to emulate the world and gameplay of
Gravity Rush. While some songs were completed and approved quickly, others required several retakes and Tanaka sometimes had to defend his work from outside criticism. A particular concern for Tanaka was that the looping environmental tracks would not become tiresome for players. The ending theme "Douse Shinundakara" was composed by Tanaka and arranged by Murase. The lyrics—which used the game's constructed language—were written by Toyama, while the theme was sung by Masako Toda. Toyama wrote the lyrics based on a portion of the game's script which saw Kat transported through an introspective vision about her past. At the time of writing, production was not going smoothly and Toyama was feeling frustrated and more conscious of death in the wake of a
severe earthquake in Japan in 2011. Realizing that death was inevitable and that people should enjoy the moment, Toyama wrote the lyrics to imply this message. Toyama was worried during the recording process due to the lyrics being fictional, but Tanaka advised Toda to sing the song as if she were humming a tune in a bar. An official album release,
Gravity Daze Official Soundtrack, was published by Team Entertainment on March 21, 2012. The album has received positive reviews from music critics. ==Release==