![]() Now they are a team of 10, spread across the United States and even overseas. The Co-Founders of +Mpact Games have worked on Hanako whenever time permitted over the years, slowly building their dream. “It’s about overcoming personal adversity, in its essence,” said Connor. “It thinks it’s doing good, but it’s actually destroying its future.”Īs Matt, Connor, Ajani and their team have built Hanako, it has come to mean something special to each of them. The Yamai clan “represents a cancerous element to the host,” said Matt ( yamai translates to “disease” or “illness” in Japanese). It’s not simply a game about two warring clans - it’s a personal narrative of purity and hope combatting a misguided force. He began building the game to honor her, and the themes present in Hanoko pay homage to her memory. The original catalyst for the project was the death of Matt’s mother in 2008. However, Hanako is not just a game - it’s a memorial. There’s a focus on directionally-driven combat, meaning that the type of attack your character performs depends on the direction in which they’re moving. In addition to weapon classes, there are four distinct game modes: Battle (team vs team), Capture the Informant (their take on Capture the flag), Village Siege, and Assassination (player-controlled VIP). The Ite taking aim, while a naginata-wielding warrior destroys a Kenshi. ![]() And you will definitely need skills - like the Japanese martial arts, these classes take time and practice to master. For each weapon class, there is a 3-pronged skill tree that the player can choose to develop. Your character can also choose to wield the naginata, a polearm-style weapon comprised of a wooden shaft fitted with a katana blade. The ninja is reserved as a specialist class, like a rogue or assassin. The Kenshi, or “sword saint” wields the katana (the traditional curved Japanese sword reserved for samurai). The four classes represent four traditional Japanese weapon arts. There’s a great deal of attention to weapon and movement accuracy - Ivan Ortega, a martial artist specializing in Kenjutsu, provides the weapon choreography for two of the four character classes: Sword and polearm. ![]() “This is definitely a skill-based game,” says Matt. Hanako is a 16-on-16, team-based deathmatch-style multiplayer online PC game (no hack n’ slash here). The Yamai have a vision for Japan, one which they hope to achieve by whatever means necessary, even if it means killing the emperor’s sons. The Hanako clan serves as the new shogunate for the emperor, but when the emperor dies, it leaves a power vacuum that the Yamai try to seize. At the surface, this is a game about two clans, the Hanako and the Yamai, fighting for dominance in Sengoku-era Japan. Over the years, the idea for Hanako has changed, but the inspiration for it has remained the same. They bonded quickly over Japanese culture and martial arts, and poured their knowledge into their work. Ajani later joined the team while he was working on his graduate degree at Georgia Tech. Matt and Connor met during college at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Atlanta, and first began their work on the project then, often in Connor’s uncle's basement. It is a project inspired by love and personal adversity. Hanako’s success so far is a measure of how hard the creators have worked to honor their roots. Hanako is a game inspired by reality - but not just martial accuracy. If that was not enough, in March they were invited to Epic’s HQ (makers of Unreal Engine 4, which +Mpact Games used to build Hanako) to stream the game. Hanako was Steam Greenlit in an astonishing 9 days with 7.5 thousand votes - one of very few games that have been Greenlit in less than 2 weeks. The latest rendition of their game just won first place in the Investor Conference this weekend at Siege Con in Atlanta. Friends since 2008, they have been working to produce their game, Hanako - Soul of the Samurai, under the company name +Mpact Games. That’s what Matt Canei, Connor McCarthy, and Ajani Thomas are doing. ![]() How cool would it be to make a video game with your best friends?
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