2007's Professor Layton and the Curious Village was Level-5's first self-published game. As such, there was a great deal riding on its success.

Akihiro Hino, president of the Japanese development studio Level-5, had the idea for a series of puzzle games based on the Atama no Taisou series of puzzle books, which he grew to love when he was a child. The books, written by Professor Akira Tago from Chiba University show none of the quaint literary homage found in the Professor Layton games. Indeed, Atama no Taisou translates to the sternly functional 'Mental Exercises'. "We thought we could turn these books into a pleasant, casual game by just adding a few game-like elements," says Hino.In 2006 Level-5 began work on a prototype, working directly with Professor Tago to translate his riddles into video game form. But during this time the studio was refused the Atama no Taisou name due to copyright infringement. Despite the setback, the demo was at an advanced enough stage to provide Level-5 with a route forward. "We'd created a bonus mode in which the player would solve puzzles as part of a story," Hino says. "So we developed this mode and created a story based around the puzzles you'd find in Tago's books."It was a small leap of logic to cast the protagonist of a riddle-based game as a detective. Unusually, Hino decided to create a pair of characters for the player to inhabit. "We wanted to offer two intelligent characters who could bounce ideas off each other," says Hino. Drawing inspiration from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's pair of proto-detectives, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, Hino asked one of his artists to draw an English gentleman and a younger character. "When I saw the illustrations I temporarily named them Professor Layton and Luke," he says. "The names seemed to fit perfectly and before I knew it they'd stuck. The characters stayed just as I had conceived them at the beginning."Hino began by writing an outline of the game's basic plot. It was a story of a wealthy widow, Lady Dahlia, whose late husband's fortune was tied up in an unsolved riddle. Unable to access the fortune, she wrote to Professor Layton inviting him to her Gallic hometown, St. Mystere, to try his hand (and wits) at the problem. "I begin each game with just the world view and game concept," explains Hino. "Then I write until finally I end up with maybe around 50-100 pages that can be used as a working script. This is then broken down into the game's dialogue and text."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...ndos-detective

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