Touchten Games’ Brilliant Girl is a mobile nod to Mega Man

The developers at Touchten Games grew up playing Capcom’s beloved platformer Mega Man. It was a game near and dear to many of their hearts. So when Keiji Inafune announced Mighty No. 9 and the game’s Kickstarter funding skyrocketed, Touchten’s CEO and co-founder Anton Soeharyo contacted Inafune-san.

Soeharyo said that the team offered its services should Inafune-san ever decide to port Mighty No. 9 to mobile. But Inafune-san never replied. To Soeharyo, it seemed like Inafune-san was purely a “console guy”, and that he didn’t believe in mobile as a legitimate gaming platform. But Touchten did. And it decided to take matters into its own hands. Soeharyo recounted the team wanting to make something like Mega Man to fulfil its developers’ dreams. Rather than infringe on copyright or copy the game outright, Touchten wanted to do this:

We just want to make a game that we would want to play.

The running game codenamed Brilliant Girl thus began development in April 2014. Spearheaded by a six-man team, it is centred around Yura Anders, a robot cat girl who is trying to catch Cammy, the human equivalent of a mouse. The team shared that even though Mega Man was a big driving force, it didn’t want Brilliant Girl to be a copycat.

A first look at Yura, protagonist of Brilliant Girl.

While you can shoot enemies and jump in the current prototype, all this is done while the game has you on autorun. Touchten also thought of switching player perspectives between 2D and 3D as the character ran, then later decided to develop something “closer to Time Crisis’ bosses”. Right now, the game’s perspectives are fixed to swap between ordinary endless platforming, and panning first-person experiences à la Time Crisis.

(See: 5 things that give a running game its speed)

According to the development team, the freemium game will have three different bosses, 20 weapons, and 15 sets of armor at launch. While there will only be one continuous tileset to begin with, more worlds are expected to be added in future updates. Nonetheless, Touchten said that it will be trying to “put as much as [it] can” into the initial release.

Armor Yura will be able to wear in-game.

When asked about the notorious difficulty of the original Mega Man platformers, the team said that the game would be “easy to learn, but hard to master”, and said that it would consider adding a hardcore difficulty level for dedicated Mega Man fans.

To be honest, the alpha gameplay prototype that was shown at last month’s Mobile Game Asia conference did not look promising. Movements were stilted and artwork was less than stellar. But that was an alpha build. And it seems like there is a game worth supporting in it.

(See: Tinker Games puts out Kickstarter for 2D side-scroller Pale Blue)