Debug Nephemee Developer Noroma Talks Buggy World and Cute Characters at Bitsummit
The interview reveals how a solo developer with no prior art or game-dev experience built a multi-screen puzzle game inspired by Cave Story, now backed by a major publisher's indie label.
Reporting from 1 sources: 4Gamer.net.
At BitSummit PUNCH, developer Noroma discussed DEBUG NEPHEMEE, an adventure game published by Toei Games. Players control four mini-games simultaneously to fix a buggy world inhabited by cute animal-like Nephemy characters. Noroma, a former engineer, cited Cave Story as a major inspiration and described learning programming, art, and music from scratch.
At BitSummit PUNCH, Japan's largest indie game event, developer Noroma sat down with 4Gamer to discuss DEBUG NEPHEMEE, an adventure game published by Toei Games. The game is set in a world called Nepherum, where cute animal-like characters called Nephemy live. A phenomenon called bugs is corrupting the world, and players must make the bugs even more buggy, hack them, and debug them. This requires playing four mini-games almost simultaneously, mixing puzzles and action.
Noroma, who has a background as a system engineer, said he quit an information science university in his first year to make games. He had no drawing experience before starting game development and taught himself programming, composition, and art. He cited Cave Story, the free game by Daisuke Amaya, as the inspiration that made him want to create games. Noroma said he is imitating Cave Story's dot-painted standing portraits for DEBUG NEPHEMEE.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.