Curve Studios on its working relationship with Nintendo
Curve Studios is quickly growing into a reliable studio for Nintendo. The company is completely independent, but it has produced two well-received downloadable titles for the Big N thus far: Fluidity and Fluidity: Spin Cycle.
Perhaps Curve’s success on Wii and 3DS stems from Nintendo’s involvement. According to design director Jonathan Biddle, Nintendo was “very involved” and the two “collaborated really well” on Spin Cycle. This was likely the case for the first Fluidity, too.
Biddle discussed Curve’s relationship with Nintendo in an interview:
They were very involved. They expected us to be autonomous and they expected us to understand how they work. But they were always there for feedback and always offering their own ideas. We collaborated really well — we used our expertise and when it comes to communicating with them, we were always passing ideas back and forth and the game just got stronger as a result. The fact that they have all this heritage and that they’re Nintendo, I would say that they know games better than anyone. They make the best video games in my eyes in the way that they approach things. We obviously have our way but we’d be silly to just dismiss their advice, so we definitely take them very seriously and they’ve been great support in making this game be as good as it can be.
We obviously have milestones where feedback is much more formal and goes through Nintendo Japan. We get feedback from the producers there and then that’s fed through our producers and we discuss what we want to change based on their feedback. Our producers in Nintendo of America — who are actually NCL producers — were in constant contact. When it came to the levels, we had a database which was a list of issues for every level, meaning that they played through the entire game and wrote down any issues that they found. We discussed all of those issues to see what was the best response. So we were constantly iterating the levels and sending them to them and they’d say “Yeah it’s better now, but what do you think?” and we’d say “Yeah, I know what you mean it’s not quite right”, which was usually followed up with a “Well, how about this?”.
They were a good sounding board when it came to puzzle design. We’re much better at puzzle design now having done the first game and we’re doing some interesting things — some of the strongest puzzle design in the industry — but to have them there to help push it on is great as well.
