Anonymous developer details experience working with Wii U

Eurogamer has put up an intriguing piece “from a respected third-party”, who shared his experience working with the console. The article covers Nintendo’s initial reveal to the developer up through the release of the company’s game.

Details rounded up from the post can be found below. I also highly suggest checking out the full thing right here.

Reveal

– Developer “worked on the hardware extensively and helped to produce one of the better third-party titles”
– Nintendo held a presentation, and said they wanted a console that is small like Wii and wouldn’t make noise
– This is so “mum wouldn’t mind having it in the living room”
– Point was raised in the meeting that the Wii U seemed significantly slower than the Xbox 360 in terms of raw CPU
– Nintendo dismissed it and said that the “low power consumption was more important to the overall design goals” and “other CPU features would improve the performance over the raw numbers”
– Devs communicated through emails after the reveal and the thought was “I like the new controller, but the CPU looks a bit underpowered”
– Some people started doing their own calculations to guess Wii U’s performance and some even built custom PC rigs with under-clocked CPUs to try and gauge performance of their code
– The thought was that it wouldn’t be powerful enough to run next-gen engines and could possibly struggle doing current-gen
– Despite their own tests, “management” decided to go ahead and make a game for Wii U

Development

– After this decision, dev kits started to arrive
– Kits were bigger than the final design
– Had a mixture of connectors and ports used for development
– Developer had a tough time compiling and running code
– Nintendo had provided an integration of their dev tools into Visual Studio, but this person said “it didn’t work, not even close”
– Time was spent working through these issues and reporting them to Nintendo
– Was eventually worked out through another third-party company who had been working on the same problem
– Compilation times were said to be “really slow, even for minor changes”
– “link step” took a lot of time as well
– “Link times were measured in multiple (four or more) minutes on Wii U compared to around one minute on other platforms”
– Dev says debugger, part of the toolchain Nintendo licensed from Green Hills Software, had a clunky interface and was very slow
– This made “the actual development of code harder than it should have been and ate into the development time of the game”
– Team lost days of time compiling, linking, debugging overheads
– Doing so cut down on the amount of features that could be included before the release date
– Release notes of new dev kits “rarely stated what had changed”
– Developer needed some issues addressed by Nintendo during development
– Questions were sent to local Nintendo support
– They didn’t know the answer, so the wait from Nintendo Japan took about a week
– Cut back some features because the CPU wasn’t powerful enough
– “Code optimised for the PowerPC processors found in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 wasn’t always a good fit for the Wii U CPU, so while the chip has some interesting features that let the CPU punch above its weight, we couldn’t fully take advantage of them”
– “However, some code could see substantial improvements that did mitigate the lower clocks – anything up to a 4x boost owing to the removal of Load-Hit-Stores, and higher IPC (instructions per cycle) via the inclusion of out-of-order execution”
– GPU was very capable
– Team ended up adding “polish” features as a result
– “There was even some discussion on trying to utilise the GPU via compute shaders (GPGPU) to offload work from the CPU – exactly the approach I expect to see gain traction on the next-gen consoles – but with very limited development time and no examples or guidance from Nintendo, we didn’t feel that we could risk attempting this work”
– GPU is better than the PS3/360, “but leagues away from the graphics hardware in the PS4 or Xbox One”
– DDR3 RAM and bandwidth deficit compared to PS3/360 wasn’t a problem for the team

Online

– Gaps were noticed in the documentation and the code
– Nintendo said it was still working on the code, but said they shouldn’t worry as it would be available soon
– A lot of the Mii and friends content was unavailable so the team couldn’t test how the existing code would act in a “retail environment”
– Code was done in the dark in hopes that it would work
– Nintendo later said in a conference call that the features and OS updates to support them would be available just before launch
– The team ended up receiving the final networking features just before the worldwide launch of Wii U
– Kits had to be flashed to the retail mode which had the Mii and network features
– Doing so was “a very complicated manual process that left the consoles in a halfway state”
– Could test features in retail mode to make sure they worked properly, which was a requirement for Nintendo’s certification
– Unfortunately, the mode makes debugging limited
– “As developers, we had to make a choice and hope that any issues that you found were due to the (untested) OS code and wouldn’t happen in the final retail environment”
– ” What should have been simple tasks were long-winded and error prone. Simple things like sending a friends request to another user were not supported in the OS, so you had to boot a separate program on the console manually, via a debug menu, so that you could send one. But if any error occurred there was no way to debug why it had failed, it just failed.”

Release

– Game was well-received
– Sales “were less than impressive”
– “we would be lucky to make back all the money that we had invested in making the game in the first place, and although the management publicly supported the Wii U platform, it is unlikely that we would ever release another Wii U title”
– Developer believes third-parties initially backed away from Wii U because of experience using the toolchain/hardware, lack of support from Nintendo, sales, and arrival of PS4/Xbox One