Making of Karateka Videos Provide Cool Look Behind the Scenes

This week we will get to see Karateka kick its way into the App Store. The game is a remake of Jordan Mechner's 1984 title of the same name. To help celebrate and promote the game's release, Mechner and the dev team at Liquid Entertainment released a series of making of videos about the game that give gamers a cool look behind the scenes.

The episodes have ranged from talking about the animation, inspiration, sound, and gameplay elements that have gone into the new version of Karateka and how they are similar and different in certain respects from the original. The most recent episode centers around the difficulty of the 1984 version and how that would be altered for a modern game audience that expects a more forgiving environment. In the original game, you only had one life and if you died, well ... that was it.

They came up with a clever solution to this problem. You would get three lives in this new game, but each life would correspond to a different character. If you lose your first life, then it's over for that character, but you have two more tries with different martial arts experts to try and save the girl. We think this is a great solution to this problem, giving the new game more story lines and gameplay options in the process, as each different character has a unique fighting style.

The latest video is embedded below. And if this game is already floating your boat, be sure to check out the whole series, which provides a really cool look into what it takes to put out a top notch iOS game. Karateka hits the App Store this week.