Curve open to Stealth Inc 1 for Wii U, Fluidity Wii U was proposed to Nintendo, future eShop support, more

Curve Studios is currently hosting a Reddit AMA, which can be found right here. A lot of interesting details have been shared about the company and its various games. For a quick roundup of the more noteworthy tidbits, check out the summary below.

On the possibility of Stealth Inc 1 for Wii U…

As for a port of the original, I think we’d basically really like to, but we’re only a small studio, and SI2 has taken all of our main bandwidth for the past year or so (we obviously also have our porting team who are always in submission too 😛 ) – so we’ve not really had time to consider it or look at what it would take/cost.

I think if SI2 is a success on eShop, then we’d love to bring the original over in some form. I always favoured the idea of DLC as an addition to the second game, but a standalone version might be better. Fingers crossed we get the chance!

On big mechanics cut from Stealth Inc 2…

One big feature that was initially planned was underwater sections! This would have been pretty crazy as it would have had an affect on all game mechanics… unfortunately this is the same reason why it was cut. It would have been way to much work to modify all game objects to work with this concept, as cool as it could have been.

Maybe for Stealth Inc 3…!

We wanted to do competitive multiplayer fairly early on! I think our ideas sounded really cool and probably would have been some kind of asynchronous multiplayer thing where the gamepad player tries to kill clones using the traps… but we never got to prototype it because we had to make sure all the other stuff was up to scratch!

Yeah, we over-reached with the multiplayer. There was already level sharing, a co-op gamepad mode, Miiverse integration and a whole Metroid overworld to build (alongside almost a Stealth Inc 1’s worth of test chambers).
Plus we only had 10 months.

Budget. It’s expensive to make games, and we could only afford a 10 month development cycle. We saved time by prototyping the whole game in Game Maker (I spent most of the development doing this) using the original Stealth Bastard codebase, and then ported the results to Wii U once we knew that it worked. It meant we could build levels from day one instead of waiting for the game to hit Wii U.

On whether we’ll see Fluidity on Wii U…

A Fluidity for Wii U was proposed but never went ahead. We’d still love to do that at some point; our ideas were really quite special in my eyes. If you guys were all to go buy Fluidity Spin Cycle, it might help. 🙂

Nintendo own the IP, so any chance of a new one rests solely with them. They obviously don’t do Kickstarters!
Like I said somewhere else on here, we pitched a new Fluidity for Wii U to Nintendo, but it didn’t get the go ahead. Who knows what will happen in the future though? Would love to do it.

On Fluidity: Spin Cycle’s cut character…

Early on in Spin Cycle’s development, we actually had lava! He was a fully formed character like Eddy, there is even art around for it somewhere…
It was so sweet, you could burn through rock, and water would harm you. It was slower and thicker to move around too. In the end, we decided we had so many applications for water, that we focused the game and did away with it.
I’ve probably just broken my NDA by talking about it.

On future Wii U support…

We would love to make more Wii U games, and we have some planned for next year! As you say, we do need our current games to do well on the eShop before we can commit to how many games we can bring to the system, but we’re cautiously optimistic right now!

We’ve got loads of new titles for 2015 – at least six – and we hope that some of them will be on the Wii U the same time as they come to other consoles. It depends on how well the reception is for our current games and what type of games work best on the console, but we’d love to do more with Nintendo.

On how Curve managed to hack the 3DS to allow for two button presses at once…

3DS Fluidity Spin Cycle challenged us with the ‘360 rotation’ feature, which meant we couldn’t use the buttons or 3D. We managed to hack the hardware’s response to touch input on the touch screen so we could let players press two buttons at once. The goal was that no-one ever noticed that they could press two buttons on the single touch screen, and I’ve never seen it mentioned anywhere, so I think we did (even Nintendo were impressed)

On Lone Survivor’s Wii U sales thus far…

So, yeah Lone Survivor is performing pretty much exactly as we expected for a game that is out on most other platforms. We’re pleased with how it’s doing, certainly.

On how Eddy from Spin Cycle got in Smash Bros. 3DS as a trophy…

NCL wanted him in and so they asked us. Obviously Fluidity is their IP, and they wanted it represented. It was awesome to be asked to be included, to be honest. Immortalised in a Smash Bros game!