At the start of September, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, a new Metroidvania game funded through Kickstarter last year, was delayed to 2018. Director Koji Igarashi, most famously known for his work as the creator of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, said he needed additional developer support in order to complete the game and reach his quality standards. Earlier today, Iga announced that he's partnering with 505 Games. The publisher is the newest partner in the saga to create Bloodstained. The record-setting campaign pulled in over $5.5 million USD and became the highest funded game project in the crowdfunding site's history.

Bloodstained reunites key creators, like artist Ayami Kojima and composer Michiru Yamane, from the Castlevania series to work on its spiritual successor, but it's also a chance for Iga to return to a genre he loves. IGN caught with him during Tokyo Game Show to talk about the game’s delay, why he needs more resources to finish it, the undecided fate of the Wii U port, and more.

On the Delay and Working With Inti Creates

Iga cited two big reasons for Bloodstained’s delay to 2018. The first one that, with any Kickstarter campaign, a developer starts off with what the basic game is and a release date based off that. Stretch goals, expanding content, are added not all of them are planned from day one. “Some of those are planned on the fly after you see how many backers continue to flow,” Iga said. “[Stretch goals] are always discussed with the R&D side to make sure that the price is realistic for what you're making, because if you don't do that, then you get stuck in a situation where you can't make money and can't finish the game, and I can't do that.”

“However, you get more money, you can create more content with the Kickstarter campaign, but you can't push the date back during the campaign,” Iga said. “So you're able to adjust scope and you're able to adjust budget, but you're not able to adjust the timeline. That, in and of itself, is kind of broken as a system.”

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“The second that we started to hit so many stretch goals, it became more than one standard team could make. So unless we made this 100-person team size then there's no way we were going to be able to finish it by the original date.”

The second reason for Bloodstained’s delay is something Iga takes personally: the high quality of a game he wants to make. ”As we started building up the game and showing it to some of the backers, we had a very high quality bar. The graphics were good. Better than a traditional Iga-vania game that I've made in the past,” he explained. “And once you start setting the bar that way, you start to focus on that and say it has to be that high level. It has to be high quality. And you get yourself in a situation where you're writing checks that you can't necessarily cash based on the time that you have”

“ It was either drop the quality bar one notch in order to get it out sooner, or be satisfied with the quality and continue to make sure it was going to be maintained...

“It was either drop the quality bar one notch in order to get it out sooner, or it was to be satisfied with the quality and continue to make sure it was going to be maintained throughout the project. At the end of the day, I want to go with the quality. This is important to me,” Iga said.

Bloodstained originally started as a collaboration between Igarashi’s company, Artplay, and developer Inti Creates, the company behind Azure Striker Gunvolt and the ill-fated Mighty No. 9, which released a few months ago to awful reviews. We asked Iga if some of his issues with Bloodstained’s quality falls on Inti Creates. Prior to the interview, Iga showed IGN a section from the opening area of his new game, and he references it in his answer.

“If you look at what you saw here, that's some of Inti, and some of us. But if you looked at the demo that out at E3 that everybody liked, that was Inti's quality bar that they put forward and made. They are able to come out with high quality,” Iga explained. “However, to your point, one of the issues is that their style of building on a game, while it does tend to come up with high quality when they spend the time on it, they don't necessarily have the true understanding of how to procedurally use the best tools in Unreal. Without being able to use those, you can't create the game in the most efficient manner that you need to.”

Bloodstained October Update Gallery 5 IMAGES

“While we were working together to make sure it had everything in it, it was quite clear that we needed to bring in another team that is able to take that procedural know-how to be able to take something, copy it, use some random generation to populate an area in a more computer-driven way rather than people doing it all by hand,” he said. “Without doing that, just the sheer size of what we're trying to create would never be done on time. So bringing in someone to help like that is definitely necessary to make sure that we're going to make the game at the right quality, but also hitting this new timeline.”

Iga acknowledged that once a new studio comes on board, Inti Creates role in making Bloodstained will be reduced because they aren’t making the procedural pieces of the game. We asked IGA why procedural generation using Unreal to create the backdrops of Bloodstained was so important to him. “Yeah, we’re trying to be modern, and if there's an official way to do something better than you should probably do it,” Iga explained. “Just thinking about the sheer size of what this game is, trying to go in and do everything by hand would obviously create - it would be beautiful, but it would create lots of delays and things like that.”

“Finding the right balance between using some technology to help you but also still making sure you're also controlling the art side of it, that's sort of what we, through our studying and evaluations, come to realize. We need to do that to get to the goal.” Iga told IGN a new development partner hadn't been selected at the time of this interview. He and the team had limited the decision to a few options and were very close.

On the Wii U Port of Bloodstained

“Yeah, it's a very complicated problem,” Iga said. “The reality is this: As timelines move on, certain pieces of hardware become irrelevant. Sometimes new pieces of hardware come out that make you think about what is the right strategy. And as a creator, usually you want to make stuff for the new hardware. That's the reality.”

“However, this was a game that was backed by people, and we made promises to listen to them. They're the people that gave us life so to speak. Any sort of change that we do or are considering that goes outside the scope of the promises we've made must be done with lots of explanation, must be done with lots of care, and must be done with lots of back and forth with them to see what options we have. We must listen to them at the end of the day, and we have made promises.”

Concept art of the castle entrance in Bloodstained.

“Unfortunately, some of those don't make as much sense anymore as they did before, and that's also reality. So you're in a very difficult position, and at the end of the day, if you're going to go in one certain direction, you want to make sure that you have support from them,” he explained.

“But so far we've, I think, been incredibly transparent through all the things that have happened with our backers, and they have been very supportive. So I'm hoping that if there is going to be a difficult decision some day, and we don't know, that we're able to have that conversation. If they say they don't get it, well that's where we're at. And if they say they do get it, well then, we'll be able to do things that are maybe more interesting. We'll see.

On IGA’s Hopes for Bloodstained Running on PlayStation 4 Pro in 4K with HDR

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”Yeah, 4K...that's a lot,” Iga said. “We tried to create assets that played well in 4K. You know, at four times the amount. Everyone on the team would die. But, I'm curious if you put this through a 4K up-res filter or whatever, with the HDR, how it's going to pop, how it's going to look. I have no idea. It may look very crappy, like you've just expanded a lower res model, but it may also look good because it's a 2.5D side-scrolling. Who knows.”

“Honestly, we want to try and get this at least 60 frames. That's the goal, but if by going with the pro we can get 120 frames, or something like that...so, basically, if it can give us a boost in framerate in boost and smoothness, animation smoothness, that could be pretty nice.”

Jose Otero is an Editor at IGN and host of Nintendo Voice Chat . You can follow him on Twitter