""The First Samurai's" environment is defined by white blocks superimposed over the game's graphics; these blocks determine attributes such as the edge of a platform, the spawn point of entities, whether a wall is climbable, and collision detection.For the Atari ST port, all the blocks needed to be 'pre-shifted', and a Vivid Images team member expressed that "We need to know how many there are so we can calculate them in advance; the editor automatically keeps track of all the different types of blocks on screen."