Heya again! After a long time of back and forth and everyone involved in this interview being really busy with a ton of stuff, I’m happy to have a shorter, fun interview for you today. I covered the Steam port of Vay a few months ago and really loved it! Moreso since that review, as some more QOL features were added, including a few suggested in said review like the disabling of HP/MP healing upon level up!
But being that the company SoMoGa is pretty obscure, has only been known for porting a few RPGs, and did such a darn good job with it for Vay, I had to find out just what made things come together and if there might be anything to look forward to in the future, so we set up a simple, fun little interview for you all to read!
With that outta the way, here we go with the SoMoGa team!
Q1: Vay was a very, very early iOS game and it was pretty decently talked about back then, at least in my circles for people wanting a RPG on their phones. What made it come back after all this time?
A1: We’re proud of the work we did on Vay, but there were some parts that really needed updating, and there were some updates we wanted to do that would be difficult then but that we could accomplish now. For example, we got a number of requests for controller support over the years, and we also wanted to make it work on other devices like AppleTV.
The original iOS version was built using the earliest iOS 2.0 betas, before the App Store was live. We asked people what they expected or wanted from iPhone games and tried to collect opinions, but the reality was that the answers you got before the App Store launched and after it launched were wildly different. Plus, those early models and OSes were much more limited compared to today.
All of those factors basically meant we had to start over and create a whole new port.
So why all that effort? Well, the truth is the biggest reason we decided to create this new version actually has a lot more to do with the future than with the past.
You see, back during Covid, a few of us met to figure out what we wanted to do next, and something that became apparent was that we’d probably need to target more platforms for some of these new projects to make economic sense. However, up until that point, our company had only released titles on iOS, and our entire development pipeline was centered around that. To support platforms like Steam or Android, we would essentially have to tear down and redo our entire pipeline and replace all our tools. Vay was a great place to start implementing that philosophy—this is why we returned to it.
Q2: On that front, any plans for Vay to get updates for the iOS platform, maybe making it up to date for modern iDevices? Your Lunar port recently got a pretty big update for iOS and is often considered the definitive version as a result. Is this steam release planned to also hit mobile later? Or is it hitting both platforms at once?
A2: Yes, actually! This new version of Vay is the first title we’re releasing simultaneously on multiple platforms — it came to iOS/tvOS, Android, and Steam at the same time, and anyone who owned the previous version on their iPhone got the new version free on iOS.
Q3: The mobile version of Vay was notable for a new, original english dub not from the original SCD release, but one that was rather silly, and clearly made as a homage to that original dub.
What was it like recording the voices for the iOS port? Was it pretty fun to record, or was there a lot of prep work to do before pulling it all off? Is any of that kept in this newer port, or was a newer dub made?
A3: It was definitely a little silly, yes, and we wanted it to be reflective of the era it came from. There were several voice actors involved — a few newer talents and a couple of established ones. We had a script, but we gave them the freedom to do ad libbing, select their own location and equipment, and so forth.
Ultimately, the team feels like some of the cutscenes came out pretty well, but there are some in need of revisions.
There’s definitely a few things we’ll do differently going forward, and we did actually want to try to update a few of the cutscenes, but it wasn’t something that we could do without a significant delay to this release. Might still do a few changes in a future update.
Q4: The older Vay port had a nice amount of quality of life features, mainly the fact that you can toggle between the original JP difficulty and the absurd US Working Designs difficulty.
I always dig QOL like this, and it sounds like this port has a few newer features added to it, such as Bluetooth support. Was this inspired by the recent quality of life updates from Lunar: Silver Star Touch?
A4: We definitely tried to use the same approach and offer some of the same options, yes.
Q5: Speaking of that Lunar port, might as well get this question out there as a means of perking interest, but if Vay does well on Steam, would there be any chance of Lunar Silver Star Touch getting similar treatment and getting a steam port?
A5: You could probably guess this, but when we looked at our most commonly received requests over the years, bringing Lunar to Steam and/or Android was definitely near the top of the list. The recent re-release of Lunar was a complete re-write and we did design it with potential ports to other platforms in mind.
At the end of the day, though, the Lunar publication rights are spread across multiple companies. We were interested in possibly releasing this version on PC or Xbox (even if we didn’t publish it ourselves), but that’s not our decision to make. We’re very happy it made it to Android, though.
Q6: And regarding future stuff… Any other retro RPG titles you guys have interest in bringing back? Vay and Lunar are the only ports you’ve made, if I’m not mistaken. Maybe a game like Silpheed?
A6: We’ve actually built a couple other ports, but even if SoMoGa itself wasn’t directly involved, a lot of our staff worked on some other companies’ titles. At one point, I think most everybody here had worked on at least one South Park game.
Silpheed is an interesting suggestion — our devs do think that was one of the most impressive Sega CD games. Offhand, one difficult aspect would be getting the controls right. You sometimes need to be very precise for those kinds of games, and that can be tough on touchscreen devices.
Anyway, these new ports are not meant to be an endgame—rather they’re paving the way for a couple of new projects. Nothing that we expect to announce anytime soon, however, so you’ll have to be patient.
….But we believe it will be worth the wait!
Q7: Last but not least, anything that the team at SoMoGa want to say to players going into Vay for the first time, or having this be their first time checking out one of your ports?
It’s been a long time since the original iOS port of this game, let alone the SCD version, so it’s pretty cool how this game is continuing to carry on after all this time.
A7: We know we can’t make everybody happy, but we really do hope everyone enjoys this new version! We enjoyed our work on it and we are looking forward to hopefully sharing more with players in the near future.
If you have thoughts, suggestions, feedback on what you liked or didn’t like, etc, please do free to email us or leave a review. Even if we don’t respond, all emails are read and we take the feedback very seriously. Thanks!
Short and sweet, just in the fun way that I like it! Thanks super much to SoMoGa for agreeing to do this short interview, and I truly do hope you consider checking out the Steam/iOS port of Vay; it seriously is some good stuff and the QOL made the game a lot more enjoyable for a newcomer such as myself.
In an age where some retro reissues do the bare minimum or make the game run even worse somehow, it was incredibly refreshing to play a lovely port that worked great out of the box and continues to get better and better. Here’s hoping that we see the next cool thing SoMoGa does in the future!