Developer BeautiFul Games on Nihilumbra, designing for the Gamepad and more

Nihilumbra was one of the many indie titles showcased for Nintendo platforms at E3 this year and the folks over at Mii-gamer sat down with developer Beautiful Games to talk about their design process and more, here’s an excerpt of the interview:

7. Nihilumbra is your first game to be released on Nintendo platforms. Why did you decide to bring Nihilumbra over to the Wii U? What is your opinion on the Wii U? Is it a good platform?

Kevin: When we started developing Nihilumbra, the WiiU didn’t exist at all, but as soon as we saw it announced we thought that it was a great platform for our game, mainly because it’s mechanics. It would be really hard (if not impossible) to port Nihilumbra to a console with a typical controller, but with that touching interface… it was perfect.

Sometime later, in a convention, we met someone from Nintendo Europe and we showed him the game. “We think that this game would be great on a WiiU” we said, “Well, what can we do to make it happen?” he answered. Everything was really easy an natural after that.

I guess that I have two different subjective opinions about WiiU, as a game designer and as a gamer.

As a game designer, I would say that it’s absolutely great. I always say that it’s the best thing that happened to console hardware since they added joysticks to controllers. With it we can make games that weren’t possible before, we can introduce asymmetric local multiplayer because, for the very first time, we have two different screens and two different input modes at the same time in one console. Really, as a game designer, I am constantly having new ideas of games that were not possible before.

As a gamer, I would say that I am concerned about the same stuff that concerns everyone: The games. It seems that there are not too many great games right now. It’s impossible to predict the future, and I’m no analyst. Let’s just say that, if Nintendo manages to build a strong base of games, it will have everything it needs to be a great console.

You can check out the full interview here

(Thanks to Mike for the tip!)