Vigil Games general manager David Adams and technical director Colin Bonstead have provided some commentary about Wii U for Game Informer in an eight minute interview. Unfortunately, I don’t believe the video can be embedded, so you’ll just have to watch the interview for yourself here. However, I’ve transcribed some of the important bits from the video for those who aren’t interested in viewing it…
– David Adams has always loved Nintendo platforms
– Excited to be involved with a new console and launch
– Was also a challenge since the corporate office asked if they could pull it off in time for E3
– Took about a week to get their base libraries up and running on the console without graphics
– Another week and a half to get graphics to a point where you could seen something on the screen and play the game (basically rainbow colors)
– Then worked on getting the features and graphical features in
– Took about 5 weeks in total from when they found out about it
– Worked on it until the last day of E3
– Fully functional build was ready at that point
– Majority of the work was three programmers
– Nintendo decided not to show the game for various reasons
– A lot of challenges and late nights
– Team was finding things and telling Nintendo about them and learned how to solve problems themselves
– This was unlike the PS3/360 in that all problems have already been solved
– First time the team has been working with Nintendo
– Nintendo has been very supportive
– Gave dev kits and access to the dev site quickly
– Nintendo does their best to answer questions
– Adams believes Nintendo seems pretty dedicated to helping developers get up to speed on the hardware and get stuff working
– Development became easier towards the end as the team became more familiar with the hardware
– Adams thinks it’ll be a pretty easy platform to develop for
– Adams believes that being able to use the controller to manage your inventory, map, and other elements will be a huge advantage to the player
– Bonstead could see you using the controller to aim a weapon in the game
– Bonstead says that, with a little effort, they could probably run the full game on the controller
– Fairly simple code can be used to put the entire game on the controller
