Miyamoto on how Wii U can change approach to game dev, small teams/projects, more
Who’s up for another interview with Shigeru Miyamoto? The latest discussion has the legendary game designer talking about how Wii U can change games, what the console’s message is, the differences in making Wii U and 3DS/DS games, Miyamoto’s hobbies leading to new game ideas, and his small teams/future projects.
Head past the break for a full transcript of the Q&A.
Miyamoto on the central message for Wii U…
“For me, personally, what’s most important is the idea that when the family goes into the living room, that the first screen they’ll interact with will be the Wii U screen. Whether they’re doing that for social elements, or for watching television, or for games, that to me is the most important element of this new Wii hardware.
“In the past, we’ve seen things like connectivity, where you have two devices working together, but the challenge there is that not everybody has those two devices. With Wii U, you have both the console and the game screen together in one package, so everybody who owns it has exactly what they need to enjoy that asymmetric gameplay. That makes it easy for developers to take advantage of that unified ecosystem and build for it.
“One other thing that I think may possibly change the way people design games is because of the use of the motion sensing technology and the gyroscope, and combining that with the screen. Now you have the ability to look around in a space that expands beyond the TV, this world that completely surrounds you.”
Miyamoto on how designing a Wii U game is different than making a DS/3DS game…
“Well, I think from a game design perspective, in the living room, when you have one large TV that everyone is looking at, and you have this one smaller screen that a single player has, that they can hide from the others and do different things on. I think that creates very different game experiences from, just for example, having two screens locked together in one position.
“Of course, you could always use this to also take, for example, 3DS games and perhaps bring them to the living room. So perhaps you could have a Nintendogs game where you’re interacting with the dog on the Wii U Gamepad and then you see a bigger dog there. (The Wii U hardware is) really inspiring us and giving us a lot of good ideas.”
Miyamoto on how his hobbies lead to new ideas…
“Mr. Iwata always tells me I’m not allowed to tell anybody. It had been, for a long time, sort of a secret that I was going to art museums. But we just announced the project at the Louvre in Paris. So I can talk about that now. Maybe in the fall it might feel a bit more complete.”
Miyamoto on working with a small teams and his new project…
“One thing I want to clear up is, people like to ask me if I want to do a small project with a small team. I do like working with a small team, and I’m working with a number of small teams on a lot of different ideas, but the problem is because of all these different roles that I have to fulfill, it takes me a long time to write the design document. It’s not that it’s a small project, it’s that small teams take longer to do larger design documents. So maybe this time next year I’ll have something ready to show you that perhaps will illustrate that idea. I have some storyboards that I have to draw before I finish this trip. It’s fun, I use Flipnote Studio to draw my storyboards.”
