WiiWare: Developer Impressions

vashivihan · 05-12-2008, 01:36 PM

Quote:

Is Nintendo’s new downloadable games service set to be an Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network killer? We get the low-down on WiiWare from Frontier Developments’ David Braben, Telltale Games’ Dave Grossman and Mastiff’s Bill Swartz.

ImageWhile the performance of Nintendo’s Wii Virtual Console has been “not bad”, according to company executive Shinji Hatano, raking in around $33 million from 7.8 million downloads by the end of November 2007, the company has long been accused of lagging behind the competition when it comes to its Wii online offerings.

That could be about to change with the launch of WiiWare. In contrast to the Virtual Console, which offers classic titles from systems of previous generations, WiiWare plays host to new, original games for download from small and large developers alike.

Nintendo has promised that WiiWare will reduce “the barriers that make console game development prohibitively expensive” and showcase “original ideas in the most democratic environment in industry history”, but will the service really free developers from the traditional constraints of videogame development? Will it soon be full of shovelware? Will game size limits and console memory restrictions put off developers? And just how committed really is Nintendo to online?

We asked Frontier founder David Braben, Telltale Games design director Dave Grossman and Bill Swartz, head woof at Mastiff, about their experiences developing WiiWare titles LostWinds, Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People (SBCG4AP) and Major League Eating: The Game, respectively, and about their hopes for the service.

Did you approach Nintendo about making a WiiWare title or vice versa?

Braben: They came to us with the concept of WiiWare and we thought it was perfect [for LostWinds]. Then in a relatively quick time we put together the game. We had a lot of concept art which we showed Nintendo and I think to be fair we were both quite excited by it because we thought it would be fun.

Grossman: Ooh. That’s a good question. I think we approached them first a long time ago about doing something for the Wii. I think for a little while it was hard for us to get our phone calls returned until Sam and Max started coming out and they got very excited about it and then they started talking to us [about SBCG4AP, pictured below].

Swartz: Oh no, no. We went to them. It would have been nice if they had called us up and said ‘hey, we’ve got this great game, you should do it,’ but no, unfortunately we had to go to them.

Why did you choose to develop the game for WiiWare rather than Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation Network?

Braben: It was the way that you control the wind that was important and the control of the Wii was absolutely defined by that. We didn’t immediately think, ‘ah yes, it’s a WiiWare game,’ but we did think ‘oh, it’s a Wii game.’ There are games that use two Wii controls, where you have button combinations across the Wiimote and the Nunchuck, and that’s something that feels quite uncomfortable in my opinion. Then there are games that use the Wiimote purely as a pointer and don’t use the Nunchuck at all, but what we’re doing is subtly different in the sense that you’ve got one character controlled by the Wiimote, which is the wind, and the other where you’re directly controlling the character talking, and so it feels very natural to have the two controllers separated.

From a development point of view WiiWare is great. It means we can take bigger risks, we can experiment with new control mechanisms at less financial and commercial risk and I think that’s a fantastic thing.

Grossman: I do think that the Wii lends itself in particular to the kind of idea based gameplay that we do although ultimately I think we’d like it to be on all of the downloadable channels. The interface is meant to be very, very simple. You don’t need tons and tons of buttons but if you have something you can just point with that’s just great, so it was kind of an easier mindset for us to be on the Wii then perhaps on the other platforms, but obviously our games are meant to be simple and have a broad appeal and would probably be good on any of the downloadable channels.

Swartz: The Wiimote was the killer, period. Does Xbox have a Wiimote? Honestly, we wanted to do a Wii game, we wanted to do a WiiWare game, that was really very much in the front of our minds, and we wanted to do something with a license attached. Tony Hawk was already taken. No seriously, I really didn’t want to go out there and just make up some random sport by myself, you know, let’s do a Marble Madness rip-off because no one’s done one for six months. That was really what we didn’t want to do. We wanted to do something with a license attached but the last thing I wanted to do was try to be a mini EA or a mini Activision or a mini Ubisoft because we’d get creamed. So we were looking for a sort of minor but cool license that had some value that would let us use the controls in a unique way and ideally something that hadn’t been done before. No one has done an eating game - well, at least an eating game like ours, and it has the advantage because it is so hand to mouth and that is a really neat way to use a Wii control.

How long did the game take to develop and what size team did you have working on it?

Braben: The team size has kind of changed throughout development. It was initially quite small, around twelve people I think, and we started in sort of mid-to-late December last year. We played around with the controls, but then it has essentially grown since then, so it’s taken about four months. It’s a little bit like going back to old ways of games being developed because it’s the first time we’ve actually put in place our own processes, which we’ve always wanted to do. The beauty is we can do that because there’s no one else involved in the production of the game.

Grossman: The team is a little smaller than the Sam and Max one, probably a dozen or fifteen people. Each episode takes probably four months from beginning to end but there is also a little bit of a ramp up time at the beginning of the season for another couple of months, so from initial concept to delivery the first episode’s probably taken about six months.

Swartz: Work started in September. MLE:TG is basically a fighting game and fighting games are pretty labor intensive. We've also had a number of people move on-and-off the project as it has gone through various stages. The core team was about 12 people. However, we've had as many as eight artists and six animators on the game.

Was the size cap on WiiWare games or the Wii’s memory limitation a development issue?

Braben: No, not really. I mean to be honest, every single game we’ve ever done has had size limits and the issue is not specifically the size limits. If you think back to Elite and 22k or whatever it was, you know on one of those 2k machines, the constraints now are way, way less. And the other point is the game has still got to run within the memory of a machine. What you’re actually talking about is the medium size limit and since everything can be stored and compressed, that’s much less of an issue. I think that what it has done is very much focus us. In a sense, any limitations, and there are always limitations, do help. It’s just part of the creative process.

Grossman: I’m not sure precisely but [the size limit] is something like 40 megabytes and yeah, it’s a constraint working within that, but our technical people are pretty good about getting stuff compressed in the right ways to get the quality.

Can you tell me how WiiWare game pricing is determined and how royalties compare to those of the other online services?

Braben: I would ask questions like that of Nintendo.

Grossman: I’m not really sure exactly how that works. I’m probably the wrong person to ask about that.

Swartz: Unfortunately all that stuff is covered by about twenty-seven pages of non-disclosure agreements. All I can tell you is that Nintendo has been an absolute joy to work with on every level. They have made this process so incredibly easy.

Some commentators have criticized the Wii’s software library, saying it’s full of shovelware from companies trying to make a quick buck from the system’s success, while others have suggested that Xbox Live Arcade has become overloaded with content to the detriment of the service. Are you worried about this becoming an issue with WiiWare?

Braben: Obviously it’s a concern. I think one of the issues I have with Xbox Live Arcade is it’s actually quite hard to find titles or to know of what’s happening with titles. For example, a new title can appear and unless you actively continually troll the new releases or troll down the lists, I certainly tend not to notice them. So I think there’s an issue of things being lost but I’m very hopeful about the new Nintendo Channel. To address your point about shovelware, I’d actually say that has always been true of all platforms. It’s sad to say but there have always been bad games and it’s always a concern over time. It’s difficult from the point of view of a manufacturer and I am hopeful of WiiWare simply because there is a voting scheme and I think that it will help a lot and make a big difference because I certainly would look at that. If everyone was really pleased with a game then I’d probably give it a go.

Grossman: I don’t think that’s going to wind up being a problem with WiiWare because Nintendo was pretty selective from the beginning about what was going to go forward and what was going to be okay to put on the service. That was exactly the type of thing we were trying to avoid and that Nintendo did not want - to have a shovelware channel. They wanted to make sure that there was going to be quality stuff on there all the time and that people would be able to find it.

Swartz: Let’s put it this way, I’ve certainly heard the criticism that there’s too much crap on the Wii and that all these awful titles are dragging the system down but there’s another way to look at that which is to say that Nintendo basically believes in a free market. I don’t think I’m giving away any state secrets when I say that Nintendo, by having a huge selection of software on their system, puts the consumers in control. Having a lot of software on the system means yes, a higher percentage of it is going to be bad, but it also means that you’re going to get some gems and the consumer will be able to make up their own mind. So every time I hear that there’s too much crap on the Wii my reflexive response is, ‘wait a second, have you walked down a grocery isle recently?’ Consumers get to make choices - do you really want someone else to do your thinking for you?

While the Wii has a massive installed base, are its users the type of people who are going to be into downloading games?

Braben: Well we’ll see, won’t we. I mean the question is, looking at how many people have taken on things like the Everyone Votes Channel or for that matter the browser, and certainly I know anecdotally that a lot of the people who’ve got a Wii with kids, the browsing was one of the first things they went and got, and all of the sharing of Miis, which shows that they’ve got the know how to do it.

Grossman: Well you certainly don’t have to be very technically savvy to do it. They’ve made it pretty easy to download stuff so no, I don’t think that’s a concern. If we thought that was a problem we wouldn’t be in the business that we’re in. Telltale is focused on the downloadable space which is growing and doing fine in the PC realm and I don’t think it’ll be any different on any consoles. I guess I see WiiWare as kind of being a little bit like television on demand, except for games. It seems like it's simple, it’s easy, and it’s in everybody’s house that has a Wii already. So how could you go wrong with that?

Swartz: It’s my understanding that, conservatively, sixty percent of Wiis are online. Nintendo has made it extremely easy to get online, it’s just sort of two or three clicks. Will every user use downloadable software? No, but if you look at the way DS has gotten online, you look at the number of Mario Kart online users and you see that the Nintendo user is comfortable online, broadly speaking. So I’m not particularly worried about that.

If the WiiWare response isn’t as positive as you were hoping for, will you consider releasing your title as a boxed copy or taking it to one of the other online services?

Braben: Well we see this as a Wii game. Of course there is the possibility later of doing a full disc space game but that’s something we’ll look at, we’ll see how it’s received and of course, it’s a story, so we’re hoping that we’ll also be able to follow it on the Wii with more stories if you like.

Grossman: Sure, I imagine we would do that. With the Sam and Max titles we certainly started in one place with GameTap and released them later on via our own sites and then later still through other channels, so if there turns out to be life in these games over the long term you might see them on more platforms, certainly.

Swartz: Well, this game is for WiiWare, that is what it was developed for. In the future would I be open to doing other games using the characters and the settings and the universe? Yeah, of course. I really, really believe in Major League Eating and the franchise, but would I take this particular game and just move it over? No. This game is for WiiWare.

linkage

manred · 05-12-2008, 02:17 PM

Nice article. The best part was:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Swartz

‘wait a second, have you walked down a grocery isle recently?’ Consumers get to make choices - do you really want someone else to do your thinking for you?