Art of Balance and FAST Racing Neo are using Shin’en’s second-gen Wii U engine

Several months ago, Shin’en revealed that the company was hard at work on its second-generation engine for Wii U. Both of the studio’s upcoming titles for the console – Art of Balance and FAST Racing Neo – are taking advantage of the upgraded tech, Manfred Linzer confirmed to us.

Linzer, CEO of Shin’en, said that the two games are actually just using “a subset of our new engine”. However, “we are pretty happy with the results,” he told us.

Linzer explained, “With FRN we wanted to get more realism. That was not possible with our old tech. So we implemented a lot of new stuff that allows us to get there. We are still learning but we think we are on a good way to create a really special Wii U game.”

While Art of Balance and FAST Racing Neo are taking advantage of the new engine, “Art of Balance is more on the ‘stylized’ side and FAST more on the realism side.”

We are sworn to secrecy regarding the engine’s capabilities, but know that Shin’en has managed to implement a number of improvements and a few new graphical effects. Some of these were previously used “in an ad hoc way, and not in a unified system.” According to Linzer, “Now everything blends nicely together which we need to get on a new level.”