Primary programmers of each Cave game?

[iconoclast]

I know a lot of the duties were split during development (various people were in charge of enemy placement, boss design, game system etc), I was wondering if they've ever made the exact details known for each game? I just quickly looked at this Ketsui interview on 4gamer and Ichimura says he was able to focus all of his energy on the bosses, and IKD put the suicide bullets in. I was always under the impression that Ketsui was more of an Ichimura game than Ikeda, so maybe I was wrong if he mainly focused on the bosses. I assume a lot of the exact details of each game's development are unknown, but it would be nice if we could piece some stuff together, or at least know who was mainly responsible for each game (eg. DDP = IKD, Ibara = YGW, etc). Maybe some games didn't have one guy leading the direction and it was more of a group effort. I don't know, but I'm curious about it.

[EOJ]

This is a great idea for a thread. I was thinking of making a thread with just a list of all programmers for each game, but had not got around to it yet.

"Primary" is a bit nebulous in many games. I think it's better to think of who programmed what.

From the Akai Katana interview we know Yagawa basically programmed the game himself, up to a point (maybe 90%)?, but there are 3-4 programmers listed in the credits.

SDOJ seems to be the ultimate CAVE programmer collaboration, with Yagawa doing "game flow", Ichimura doing several bosses, Ikeda doing Inbachi (and some other stuff), etc.

There are also many misconceptions about the programmers of games. Many people call Pink Sweets a Yagawa game, but there are actually two programmers listed for that one: Yagawa and Yuji Inoue. What did Inoue program for the game? Difficult to know for sure, because I don't think they ever did interviews about PS. We can make educated guesses, though. For example, the bullet patterns on high rank are similar to Futari's Ultra mode, which Inoue would later go on to help program. Another interesting link (which I've never seen anyone point out before) is Pink Sweets and Deathsmiles. Specifically, different point (or item) values for beating certain enemies with different shot/attack types (not based on the value of any fluid multiplier). And is Inoue listed on the Deathsmiles credits as a programmer? Yes indeed. On the flip side, many people claim Muchi Muchi Pork is a collaboration between Ikeda and Yagawa, but Yagawa is listed as the sole programmer for that game. We do know that Ikeda and Furukawa are listed as "system advisers" in MMP, and Yagawa used some of their ideas/input when crafting MMP's gameplay, but he still programmed everything by himself.

Speaking of Deathsmiles, it's one of the few CAVE games I can think of that has "Chief programmer" listed separately from "Programmers". (Ichimura is the Chief)

Another good question is who programmed MFBL? There is no "black label" programmer listed in the credits. Ikeda has said it is his favorite game and one person took about a month to program it by themselves, but I can't recall anywhere in which that person is named. Does anyone know? I have always assumed it was Ikeda.

[SuperPang]

This would indeed make for an interesting thread.

It'll be intriguing to see which names crop up in future arcade releases as well. I've read varying rumours on the scale of departures since 2012. Here's hoping the key figures are still there. Might even be worth looking for some familiar names in the credits of Aka & Blue and recent M2 releases.