[Developer Musings] Playtesting in the living room – perspectives on Nindies@Home
Posted on August 2, 2015 by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Developer Musings
Mauro Fanelli – MixedBag Games
Upcoming Games: MixedBag’s forma.8 is expected later this year on the eShop. This will be the team’s first game for a Nintendo platform.
The Nindies@Home had been such a cool initiative: I wanted to say it straight at the beginning, since the whole concept of ‘bringing E3 at players’ home with indie demos is beyond amazing. Since Nintendo approached us about the opportunity, telling us that maybe forma.8 could fit in the Nindies@Home program, we kept our fingers crossed and started working twice as hard on the game to put together a compelling demo. As any game developer will tell you, doing a demo is hard: you need to produce a so-called ‘vertical slice’, a portion of the game that displays it in the best possible way and that’s very polished. We’re talking ready-to-ship polished, on games that maybe are still months off. It’s not a trivial task and, for a small five people indie studio like MixedBag, it usually means to stop working on the full game and focus all the efforts on the demo.
All our fingers crossing stuff brought the desired results in the end, Nintendo told us that forma.8 was selected as one of the Nindies@Home games and… we had to deliver the demo in a very short amount of time to have it ready on the eShop for E3! Now, forma.8 is quite a chaotic project; it was our first game, it’s a huge ‘metroidvania’ action adventure – so not the easiest genre to tackle, when we started it we were young (not so much) and inexperienced (very much!), so we did a lot of noob game developers errors. Luckily, we did a couple of things right too, one of which was having a very polished part of the game, our vertical slice, ready since the very beginning for demo purposes. Thanks to that things went smoother than we expected and we were able to have our demo ready in time and polish it up even more, with only a couple of regrets. forma.8 is a deliberately slow paced experience and aims at immersing the player in the mysterious atmosphere of an alien planet. The story in the game, while narrated only by a brief intro and without any words, is also very important and it’s an integral part of the experience. We had to trim the demo a bit to get it working properly, giving it the right rhythm, and there’s no intro since it’s not the very beginning of the game. Those were though choices, but we really hope you still enjoyed the demo. Because you’ve downloaded and played it, right? RIGHT?
In the end, it was an amazing experience for us and having forma.8 on display in an initiative as big as Nindies@Home was heartwarming. We’re now laser focused on finishing the game, there’s still work to do, but we really want to deliver the best experience that we can. Hope you’ll enjoy the release version even more!
PS: the only downside of the initiative? I was in Los Angeles for all the E3 week and I had no time at all to download and try out all the other Nindies! I’ve got to try out only Rive from Two Tribes when I got back at home, and it rocks. Can’t wait for it!
Ami Langton – Ripstone
Upcoming Games: Ripstone should be a familiar face to Wii U owners, as the company previously brought Knytt Underground, Pure Chess, and Stick it to the Man to the eShop. They’re now working with Golden Ruby Games on Extreme Exorcism – a game that was included in Nindies@Home.
We’ve always had a good relationship with Nintendo having released several games on their platforms, and they’ve always been incredibly easy to talk to and very responsive.
When they approached us about the Nindies@Home program both ourselves here at Ripstone and the Extreme Exorcism devs over at Golden Ruby Games were really excited to be selected & jumped at the opportunity. We all really loved the idea and thought it was an incredible chance to be able offer Wii U fans a sneak peek of the full game experience.
Even though it was a new process for Nintendo, they were extremely supportive and offered guidance whenever we needed it. They allowed for fast approvals and turn-around time, and made the entire process very easy for us from start to finish.
There were a few minor issues along the way as you’d expect with any small development team working on a new platform, but there were no major roadblocks. It did take a bit longer than we envisioned, but with a studio as talented and determined as Golden Ruby Games and with Nintendo at our side, we knew we’d be able to bring something truly awesome to the program and to Wii U fans across the world.
Nintendo really have hit the nail on the head with their Nindies@home program. It’s a great idea and something they should aim to deliver to gamers year on year. It’s also tremendous to see their support for indie developers and their willingness to actively promote exciting, new indie games. It helps to bring indie games to a wider audience & increase awareness of these upcoming games & developers & it’s a different approach to what the other platform holders are taking.
Fans eagerly await news and reviews from E3 as it’s happening, and as exciting as it is to spectate from the side lines, there really is nothing like diving straight in and sampling the goods yourself.
The concept of bringing E3 directly to peoples living rooms, allowing them actual hands-on time with unreleased content is not only brilliant – it’s bold. And they have the additional benefit of getting discounts on the game at launch. I hope to see it inspire other publishers to do the same with their show content, for E3 and similar events in the coming years.Unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to play any of the other demos as I was working hard at E3, but Lovely Planet from our friends over at Tiny Build looks particularly awesome. Anything described as a “First Person Shooter ballet” definitely has my vote.
Ben Tester – Wales Interactive
Upcoming Games: Wales Interactive is following up on Gravity Badgers and Master Reboot – out now on the Wii U eShop – with Soul Axiom. It should be coming to the Wii U eShop at some point in the future.
Early in the year, we expressed an interest to Nintendo in potentially getting involved in any future indie promotion opportunities they may have available. That led to us being invited to submit the Soul Axiom concept for assessment which ultimately led to us being included in the Nindies@Home program. As Nintendo fans ourselves, it is a big honour for us and a great confidence boost for the team. It’s really flattering that Nintendo see potential in the Soul Axiom concept and deem it worthy enough to be featured in Nindies@Home. The process for us as always was panic, hard work then some more panic and then more hard work. It wasn’t just the physical demo, there’s lots of marketing assets required, like store banners, artwork and trailer so it requires a lot of effort from the team to make sure everything’s ready in time. The Nintendo team were a great support and guided us though the submission process and all that was required and made the experience as painless as possible.
Getting the demo up and running in time for E3 was a fairly straightforward process for us but it did come with some challenges. In the demo, we showed off one of the puzzles from the introductory chapter, which essentially introduced the basics, including the first ‘Phase’ power you receive. The initial process of getting the game running was pretty quick and easy, mainly due to the experience we gained from our past Wii U titles, Master Reboot and Gravity Badgers. However, we did encounter issues with the optimisation which resulted in a lower frame rate and slightly less impressive visuals when compared to the PC version of the game. We’ve already addressed these visual and lag issues but it was too late to make it in the E3 demo, but you’ll see the benefit of these improvements in the full release. We also would have liked to have added some of the extra features such as an option to invert the look controls, but unfortunately we weren’t allowed to include save data in the demo which restricted us a little. In general, we were very happy with the result and we are pleased to say that the Wii U development with the title has significantly progressed since E3.
Many gamers miss the opportunity to attend E3, so I think the Nindies@Home program is a great way to include those at home in all the buzz and hype that goes on that week. It’s great to see Nintendo backing so many indie developers as well, there’s some quality games being made that deserve this sort of recognition. Kudos to Nintendo for coming up with the idea, especially for offering gamers a 15% discount off the full price which is obviously a great incentive for players to download demos of new and exciting games. Looking ahead, I do hope Nintendo continue to bring this program to E3 and I’m sure they will after the success of this year. Whether or not Nintendo should pursue this more often, I’m not entirely sure. A GDC promotion could possibly be a good idea to headline more Nindies and break up the yearly cycle.
I thought this would be a great opportunity to give everyone a quick update on how the development is going since the release of the Nindies@Home programme and after hearing some of the feedback from gamers. One of the main issues that came to our attention was the low frame rate which I mentioned earlier. We have been working hard since the release of the demo and have now have significantly increased the frame rate. Of course, it’s still early days and we have plenty more optimisation to carry out, but we are confident the Wii U gamers will be impressed with the end result. We’ve also improved the visuals from the demo version to match the current PC version, meaning the environments are much more vibrant and feature improved shader effects we couldn’t previously include before the recent optimisation.
I’d just like to thank Nintendo Everything for this opportunity and to the Wii U gamers for all their feedback over the past year. If anyone would like to get in touch with us to talk more about Soul Axiom, just get in touch! You can find our details on our website.
That’s it for this entry of Developer Musings! Nintendo Everything would like to thank Dave Proctor, Bilal Chbib, Mauro Fanelli, Ami Langton, and Ben Tester for their valuable insight and for taking the time to contribute to our feature.
