[Developer Musings] Playtesting in the living room – perspectives on Nindies@Home

As part of its E3 2015 plans, Nintendo launched Nindies@Home in June. This was a special one-week promotional period in which Wii U owners were given the opportunity to download and play demos from upcoming indie titles. For gamers who couldn’t make it to E3, it allowed them to experience some of the excitement of being at the expo.

We reached out to five developers who were involved with Nindies@Home to share some thoughts about participating in the program. Below you’ll find some musings from 13AM Games (Runbow), Brainseed Factory (Typoman), MixedBag Games (forma.8), Ripstone (Extreme Exorcism), and Wales Interactive (Soul Axiom). What was it like for these studios to participate in Nintendo’s newest eShop initiative? How was it getting the demos up in time for E3? How do they feel about the program as a whole? These were just some of the topics the developers we reached out to touched upon, and each team shared some very interesting insight about the process of being included in Nindies@Home. Continue on below for their thoughts.

Dave Proctor – 13AM Games

Upcoming Games: Runbow is the debut project from 13AM Games. It’s arriving in Q3, so it should be coming sooner rather than later!

Lotcheck is hard.

When we were approached to be a part of the Nindies@Home program, we were really excited at the prospect of being involved in such a strange and interesting form of promotion, not just for us and Nintendo, but something that no one had done in the industry at all. We knew from previous conversations that it was something that Damon Baker had wanted to do for a while, and when he told us that all the stars had aligned to make it happen, we naturally shot our hands skyward. Our working relationship with Nintendo has always worked like this: they get excited about something, we get excited about being involved.

We were given a gift of insight that I don’t think we could have prepared for, however, when we were told that the demo would have to pass Lotcheck, a daunting battery of certification tests that any Nintendo game must pass before being allowed on the Wii U. Other consoles have this same rigorous exercise, always with different names, but always with the same goal: to ensure quality for the people at home. “Sure,” we said. “Ready when you are.”

What we weren’t aware of is how particular and thorough the testers were. This was something that had frightened us into a very heavy crunch to make the demo work (we only had about 5 weeks), and even with that level of preparation we managed to fail at least twice. Everything from little tiny crashes to eManual issues, we were definitely not ready for prime time. We were also doing a weird cacophonous blend of crunch feature creation, bug fixing, and design QA that I like to call QARUNCHING™. This resulted in us overhauling major communication systems for key levels because we had never had our game played by people outside of our loving care before. To make sure this worked perfectly our design team stayed up until 3AM one morning arguing over one of our Collectibow levels. They realized that they were all saying the same thing and none of them knew what was real anymore, so they went to bed.

Our programmers also made 120 builds in 5 days. We were working 100 hour weeks. We ate 6,000 burritos.

This process did teach us something incredible though, and other developers should take note: Start planning for this stuff LONG in advance. If your prototype isn’t optimized and cert-compliant by the time the core fun of the game is locked down, you are setting yourself up for even more work down the road, and a lot more bloodshot eyes and burrito-addled stomachs. And even if there are things you’re still not confident in, ultimately you have to ship it. All of our QA since has seen the same level argued over by our design team be the easiest and most fun for a lot of our testers. I liken it to ironing a shirt. Every time you iron out a wrinkle, you make a smaller one somewhere else… but eventually you have to wear the shirt.

This is something we discovered over long nights, worshiping a stuffed wolf wearing a gorilla mask with a Burger King Crown on it we named “QA: The God of Quality Assurance Testing.” Also known as QA the Scrutinous, and QA the Unfair. Praise be to QA, broken be thy game.

Seriously: get some sleep.

Luckily for us the Nindies@Home demo gave us enough of a wherewithal to add this kind of testing in our regular routine. We just submitted for final cert yesterday and we feel pretty confident that we are at least a little more aware of any potential problems this time.

It paid off though… it has been so rewarding to watch people upload YouTube videos of our game, running and laughing with their friends. We even had someone produce us some fan art! Fans seem to be loving Runbow unanimously and we couldn’t be happier. On our end, we are super pumped for Mutant Mudds Super Challenge (though none of us can beat it and Jools is a madman), Extreme Exorcism (local co-op by yourself? Hello?) and Freedom Planet (I think they were incredibly popular, and with good reason).

I hope Nintendo does this again. It’s such a unique and interesting experience, and even as developers I’m happy we have the games on our Wii U’s at home.

Would we do it again? Hell yes. Just… smarter this time.

Praise QA.

Bilal Chbib- Brainseed Factory

Upcoming Games: Brainseed Factory just opened its doors a couple of years ago. The studio has been hard at work on its Wii U title Typoman, which is due out later this year on the eShop.

I reached out to Nintendo two years ago. I was at GDC in Europe and went to their booth, because at that time Nintendo was promoting the recently announced Unity engine support and specifically calling indies to create games for the Wii U. I was equipped with some early Typoman concept arts and a gameplay trailer (with the RAIN-DRAIN puzzle – see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjEA3-p0U5I). That was not long after I had founded my company Brainseed Factory in April 2013.

As a big fan of Nintendo games and devices I was very happy that Nintendo showed interest in Typoman. There was some exchange of mails afterwards, but since I had nothing but a couple of artworks and a trailer, I decided to get back to them once I have a playable prototype and a full game design concept.

When the prototype version was finished I went to Headup Games and they became our publisher for Typoman. I met many other potential publishers prior to that but I thought and still think that Headup Games is simply the best choice if you’re an indie Ddveloper who is searching for a publishing partner genuinely passionate about your game, not only interested in market potential.

With a playable game demo and Headup Games on our side we got back in touch with Nintendo and re-expressed our interest to bring Typoman to Wii U. So they provided us with the development environment and later offered the opportunity to us to showcase our demo during the week of E3 by being part of the Nindies@Home Program.

It certainly messed up our initial development schedule and budget plan, but it was clear to us that this is a great opportunity, so we went into crunch mode and put all our efforts in making this Typoman demo a great experience. I mean players will be able to download the game for free from the eShop – failure was simply not an option. It was a great opportunity – but at the same time a very big risk at that stage of development. The demo had to be awesome – in less than one month!

Announcing our game during E3 in Los Angeles with Nintendo as our partner is simply a dream coming true, especially as a small indie developer from Germany with no track record. I am sure other indies that were part of this program think the same. I have met many Nintendo people in person during E3 ..and I love them all because they were all down-to-earth and very friendly. They definitely should pursue this next year at E3 but maybe also on other events.

Continue on for thoughts from MixedBag, Ripstone, and Wales Interactive…