The Saturn conversion, like the arcade original, was developed by Sega AM2. The programming team consisted of 15 people, most of whom had worked on the Saturn version of "Virtua Fighter 2", and some of whom had worked on the arcade version of "Fighting Vipers". Work on the conversion began in the first quarter of 1996 and took eight months. After converting the "Virtua Fighter 2" engine, the team focused first on recreating the barriers, as they anticipated this would be the most difficult part to accomplish on the Saturn hardware. Because armor and walls can be broken in the game, there was no easy way of reducing the number of polygons in those elements. In part to compensate for the lower polygon counts on the characters, a new form of dynamic lighting incorporating Gouraud shading was added to the Saturn version. In order to make this effect possible, and have the game run at a speed comparable to the arcade version, the team decided at the beginning of development that they would not use the Saturn's high-resolution mode.