Editing Radiant Silvergun (section)

=== Production ===
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| footer = ''Radiant Silvergun'' was developed for the [[ST-V]] arcade board (left) and the [[Sega Saturn]] (right).
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Development on ''Radiant Silvergun'' started in late 1997, and progressed smoothly as opposed to past projects where they had to scrap ideas and restart from scratch.<ref name=":3" /><ref name=":5" /> The title is in reference to an early concept that had people flying through the sky holding silver guns in each hand. Some of the staff thought the name was difficult to remember, but Iuchi believed that if it was hard to remember, it was hard to forget.<ref name=":4" /> Only ten people worked on the game,<ref name=":5" /> including three programmers, four artists, and one sound designer.<ref name=":2" /> They chose to develop for the Sega [[ST-V]] arcade board because Treasure had normally developed games for Sega and it was similar to the [[Sega Saturn]] home console, which they were planning on porting the game to. The team had knowledge of the Sega Saturn's hardware from developing previous games for it, so they believed it would be easier this time around.<ref name=":2" /> They did not use any expensive hardware, just conventional computers. They used [[LightWave 3D|LightWave]] for the 3D objects and freeware downloaded from the internet to make the 2D graphics.<ref name=":5" /> The programmers and designers worked hard to use every bit of power from Sega's hardware.<ref name=":5" />

Iuchi did not include [[power-up]]s in ''Radiant Silvergun'' because he felt they were distracting, and he often found himself dying when trying to manage different weapons and items. To combat this, he made the game progress simply through shooting and dodging, and mapped weapons to individual buttons and button combinations instead of needing to press a button to cycle through weapons.<ref name=":3" /> The team also made the bullets deliberately slow to appeal to a wider playing audience.<ref name=":3" /> The team recruited animation studio [[Gonzo (company)|Gonzo]] to create movie sequences with deeper story elements for the Saturn version. These sequences were not included in the arcade version because players there do not want to wait through story sequences.<ref name=":2" /> Gonzo had previously done animation for Treasure's ''[[Silhouette Mirage]]'' (1997) and Iuchi was happy with the outcome of their work on ''Radiant Silvergun''.<ref name=":4" /> The game's music was composed by [[Hitoshi Sakimoto]].<ref name=":5" />

Towards the end of development, Maegawa could not finish the game to properly [[Debugging|debug]] it because it was too difficult. He brought in skilled players who held national records at shooters to debug the game.<ref name=":5" />