Godhorn Tech:Volume1 Afterword
Afterword[edit]
This is Kamachi Kazuma.
It took a while and it was very nearly locked away without a release, but here it is at last: Godhorn Tech!
This story is set in a pastoral swords and sorcery fantasy world but with colossal sorcery weapons that tear up the terrain itself as they battle it out. There is nothing the protagonist, Miyabi, cannot destroy, so I remember having fun coming up with conversation patterns for the scenarios where he destroyed a shop or town. (But that would only get him kicked out of town or thrown behind bars, not create a major branch in the story.) I hope I managed to get some sense of that across in the novel version as well. The advertisement for the game focused more on the creation side, but it really all began with the idea that you were free to do whatever you wanted with the destruction side.
In that sense, I am pretty attached to each of the dungeons, like the derailed train or the castle town rooftops, but I think I put the most care into the initial forest. While being mercilessly bombed from afar, you need to send instructions to your borrowed bomber to tear apart the ground to form trenches, effectively creating the dungeon you need to survive. A lot of trial and error went into putting together an engaging tutorial with the two users talking to each other while you learned about the fear, destruction, and creation of the massive sorcery weapons.
I put a lot of my personal tastes into the characters this time, like the hag elf who uses a philosopher’s stone as a toy or the assassin young woman with black hair and glasses who is strait-laced but will also transform into a bunny girl if necessary. I even had a rare battle with Haimura-san over whether elves are supposed to wear green or white. I guess we all have something we refuse to back down on, huh? B-but a green elf would definitely have to be the main heroine, right!? After much fierce fighting, we gave Alicia an angelic design with the ring of flowers on her head and gave Helen a demonic design with her hair decorations and the tail.
A lot of progress was made on the Godhorn Techs, but it’s funny how I remember the ordinary handheld weapons causing a lot more trouble. Games have their own rules, so you can’t do some things that I take for granted with novels. And you can’t fudge certain things in 3D games in particular. For example, if your character carries a huge sword on their back all the time, they can’t sit in a chair with a back. And if they wear a wide-brimmed hat, their hands will clip through the brim when they raise their arms.
The 11th’s sorcery bombs was an idea for a multiplayer mode. You would try to obstruct the other players while using only the sound to locate a bomb randomly placed somewhere on the field so you could be the first to safely destroy it. There were other “game-like ideas” we came up with while trying to create some cohesion between the scenario and the system. A dungeon where you slip through the gaps between a derailed train’s cars and cargo and a dungeon where you move between the rooftops of a rioting castle town were both ideas we came up with while trying to make an enjoyable game. Now that you have read the novel version, I hope you will think up your own ideas along those lines.
Fitting it all back into a novel format was surprisingly difficult. Yet when writing the scenario, I remember trying to avoid some things that simply wouldn’t work in a novel. I wasn’t trying to switch to another writing mode, but I guess the circumstances influenced me more than I thought. I hope I learned some useful skills from this.
The character designs were done by Haimura-san and Tabata-san, and KeG-san was involved in designing the characters’ alternate outfits. Tabata-san drew the novel version’s illustrations. Thank you all! I also want to thank Square Enix, everyone else involved in the game’s production, and my editors Miki-san, Nakajima-san, and Hamamura-san. This one starts with a traditional fantasy world and then it works to tear that world apart, so the illustrations can’t have been easy. Thank you so much!
And I want to thank the readers. We finally released Godhorn Tech in some form or another. Whether you were looking forward to the game or you only learned about the game here, I think it is thanks to all of your support that Godhorn Tech avoided being an untold tale. Thank you!!
And I will end this here.
It’s unusual for me to tell a story where the characters travel all around their world, isn’t it?
-Kamachi Kazuma
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