If you’ve played Chuhou Joutai or any other Drillimation game, you may notice that every one of our games has a Japanese translation. Why is that? Well, Drillimation’s main market in mind is the Japanese market, as Drillimation Systems is intended to be modelled after a Japanese kabushiki-gaisha corporation. Although some of those joint-stock corporations tend to use the Americanized terms “corporation” or “incorporated” in their English names, many choose to use “Co., Ltd.” in their name as it is more literal translation of the phrase from Japanese.
Although it may be odd for Drillimation to be Drillimation Systems Co., Ltd. and have its Japanese name in the logo, there are a number of companies outside Japan and Eastern Asia that use “Co., Ltd.” in their company name. For example, you can hop on Google Maps and search what I mentioned before. In any of the larger cities, you may be surprised to find the US branches of many Chinese or Korean companies use the suffix.
Our love for Japanese games was the major influence of producing Japanese-language versions of our games. Learning the language for a few of us was a must in order to create those type of games. The Japanese translations have been successful enough for us to get Chuhou Joutai and its sequel featured in an article on the Japanese gaming blog 4Gamer.net. Since danmaku shooters are popular in the country, we knew we could see the majority of our Steam revenue come from there.
We want the danmaku genre to appeal to western players, so we created the health system to make the game easily accessible to new players. We also wanted to use the system to make it easier for younger players to play our games, as their reflexes may have not fully developed yet. It’s always annoying when one hit kills the player instantly. If you get hit in our games, you just lose some health.
We do understand that not all of our games’ Japanese translations are perfectly accurate. We also encourage Japanese players to chip in translation improvements. You can read more about that here. Anyway, I hope you’re enjoying your winter (or summer for our Southern Hemisphere players) and school, unfortunately, starts back up within a week from Monday. This means I will have to go back to our normal schedule at the Hurst.
Drillimation Systems 