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When you spend enough time digging into a game, there comes a certain breakpoint where finding the most efficient way to play stops being the main attraction—and testing data or pushing the game to its limits becomes fun in and of itself.
For this installment of Visiting Your Origins, I spoke with frenchbread, someone who reached that breakpoint as a child and had already started making games while still in elementary school.
MASSIVE THANKS!!!!
Introducing frenchbread
Our guest this time: frenchbread
Representative work: the Dungeon Antiqua series
—First of all, please introduce yourself!!
I’m frenchbread! I used to work as a systems engineer rather than in the game industry, but lately I’ve gradually been shifting more of my focus toward the game business.
—This summer has been unusually cool compared to most years. Have you done anything particularly summery?
It really has been cool, hasn’t it! Hmm, something summery… what would that be…
Oh! I grew vegetables myself for the first time in the garden at home! Tomatoes, eggplants, okra, and bell peppers.
But then I was away from home for about two days, and when I came back, all the tomatoes were gone. I’m pretty sure a masked palm civet did it.
How’s that? Summery enough?
—If you had to describe the Dungeon Antiqua series in a single sentence, what kind of game would you say it is?
One sentence, huh! Umm…
I guess it would be a game that started from the random thought:
“What if Wizardry had a 2D presentation like the Final Fantasy games from the Famicom and Super Famicom era?”
Something like that?
A Quick Peek Behind the Scenes
—One of the charms of the Dungeon Antiqua series is its pixel art and somehow nostalgic visual style.
How did you decide on the character designs for both the player characters and the monsters?
And if there were any rejected ideas that came up during those discussions, I’d love to hear about those too!
I have absolutely no sense for design myself, so I basically leave everything to pixel artists I trust.
The character design is handled by Em-mezzo, while the monster designs are done by Marihico and Na-shima. I really just give them the broad strokes of the setting along with class names, monster names, things like that, and then when they show me the finished work I basically go, “Ohhh, nice.”
That’s pretty much how it works, so I don’t think there were really many designs that got rejected.
—When I actually played Dungeon Antiqua 2, it felt like the delay around button inputs was much shorter than in the first game, making the overall pace noticeably faster.
Was the key response itself actually made faster, or did you introduce other changes specifically to make the game feel faster?
Just as you suspected, it isn’t really about key response or FPS.
One reason may be that the party size was reduced from five members to four, which naturally cuts down the amount of time spent entering commands in battle and reviewing everyone’s equipment.
Also, I made a lot of small adjustments to menus and other areas so that things would take as few inputs as possible.
The reason is that this game has “skills,” and its design also encourages frequent class changes, so there are more things to manage for each individual party member than in the previous game.
Because of that, I really didn’t want players to come away thinking, “The whole game has gotten more tedious to control,” or, “There are way too many inputs now.”
I want to be able to play it without getting stressed out myself, too.
—In Roema’s Rough Interview from exactly one year ago, on August 1, 2025, you mentioned the unusual nature of the game engine as one reason why a Switch port would be difficult.
At that point, did you already have some idea of how to overcome the technical challenges?
Or was the bigger bottleneck more about development time and workload than the technology itself?
At that point, I genuinely had no clear path forward.
I guess the bottleneck was both technical and workload-related.
I figured it probably wasn’t technically impossible—in the end, you could just port it to Unity—but since I don’t normally use Unity, learning it myself and then doing all that work would have been pretty difficult in terms of the sheer amount of time involved.
A Deliberately Characterless, Mechanical Game
—I think the Dungeon Antiqua series is a rather uncompromising kind of game.
Its retro visuals have this warm, approachable charm, but underneath that, it comes straight at the player with almost nothing but highly system-driven gameplay.
So, for example, when you were thinking about the scenarios and presentation for Dungeon Antiqua, was there ever a moment when you felt tempted to go:
“Okay!! This is where I make an NPC say something really profound about life!!”
If anything, I deliberately tried not to do that.
Dungeon Antiqua isn’t a game that sells itself on its story, deep worldbuilding, or complex human drama.
I think the people I’m making it for are the kind of players who are basically saying, “Enough already—just let me play a simple RPG.”
So I figured that if I started cramming my own philosophy or poetic musings into the game, it would be nothing but noise.
You could say that I deliberately aimed to make it as characterless and mechanical as possible.
Maybe that, in itself, is what gives the game its personality.
Oh.
Did I just say something kind of deep?
What You Love as a Kid Sticks with You
—Please tell me about three games you’ll never forget, along with the memories you’ll never forget about them!!
Hmm, it’s not like I have any super dramatic memories or anything…
Final Fantasy 4
The first one is Final Fantasy IV on the Super Famicom.
I first played it in elementary school, but when I went back to it in junior high, I started noticing little things like, “Oh, equipping this actually lowers my evasion rate? But this one doesn’t?”
Then I started writing detailed data down in notebooks and trying to work out how the game calculated its parameters.
You could probably call it the first game that made me realize just how much depth an RPG could have.
And I was genuinely amazed by how beautiful the music was, too.
Final Fantasy 6
The second is another Super Famicom Final Fantasy: Final Fantasy VI.
After playing it a few times, I realized, “Wait, you can actually get pretty far without leveling up that much, can’t you?” and decided to try a low-level clear.
When I say “low-level clear,” I only managed to beat it at an average level of 12.5, and nowadays we know that it is theoretically possible to clear the game at level 6, so my attempt wasn’t actually all that impressive.
But back then, I couldn’t just look things up online, and I didn’t even own a strategy guide.
Trying to figure out a way through entirely by trial and error was incredibly thrilling and fun.
I don’t think I have the mental breathing room to do something like that anymore… stares into the distance
But the biggest thing I learned from it was the realization that, depending on how you design a game, you can make all kinds of different ways of playing possible.
J.League Excite Stage ’95
The third one is also on the Super Famicom, but it’s completely different: a soccer game called J.League Excite Stage ’95.
It was simply really popular among my friends at the time. We’d gather at someone’s house and play four-player matches together.
But we played it so much that eventually we started pouring all our passion into increasingly deranged ways of playing, like “playing with the controller held upside down” or “playing with our feet.”
Spending dozens of hours practicing something that had absolutely no practical meaning whatsoever is probably something I could never do now.
Looking back, I guess that was youth.
(Was it, though?)
—In Findy’s interview, you talked about making games in BASIC while you were still in elementary school and having your friends play them.
Were there any games you made back then that made you think, “Okay, this one was actually fun!!”?
When I was in elementary school, I really couldn’t make anything very impressive.
The most I could do was stuff like a game where you just kept jumping endlessly to climb a tower—and all the graphics were literally nothing but line-drawn circles and rectangles.
When I was in junior high, though, I made an SRPG.
Each stage had one of our school teachers as the boss, and at the very end you went to defeat the principal.
That one was pretty popular with my friends.
Well, inside jokes always get people excited, don’t they? (laughs)
Looking Ahead and a Message to Readers
—Do you have any plans or ideas for what you’d like to create in the future?
For Dungeon Antiqua, I have just one more game planned after this, so I hope people who played 1 and 2 will look forward to it.
It seems like it’ll have a somewhat different flavor from both 1 and 2.
I haven’t decided what comes after that, though.
There are all kinds of things I’d like to make.
—Finally, please give a message to our readers!!
Thanks to everyone who played Dungeon Antiqua, I was able to fulfill my dream of releasing a game I made myself on Switch.
Thank you so much!
frenchbread, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me despite your busy schedule!!
Previous interview: Visiting Your Origins #7: An Interview with Mumei & Mumei — Nostalgia Glimpsed Through a Damp Stagnation – Kaburanai Games
