You may not be aware of the fact that Shin’en has created games exclusively for Nintendo platforms since the company started in 1999. They’ve worked on titles for the Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, DS, and most recently WiiWare. Art of Balance was released on the Wii Shop Channel just a few weeks ago, but the company is continuing to work on other downloadable titles for the service. One such project is Jett Rocket, which looks very promising. Shin’en CEO/Jett Rocket director Manfred Linzner was able to answer a few questions about the game for us, as well as a few other things about Shin’en in a recent interview.
Nintendo Everything: In a few sentences, can you please describe the style of gameplay in Jett Rocket?
Manfred Linzner: “3D Jump’n’Run” desribes JR’s gameplay best. You know, free exploration, no invisible walls, free camera control. You have a great amount of moves and you can interact with many vehicles and machines. One of the coolest things JR can do is to fly to higher grounds with his Jet Pack.
NE: What’s the story like in the game?
ML: Planet Yoroppa was a peaceful and quiet place, until the Power Plant Posse came. The goal of these high-tech pirates: To steal the planet’s energy. Planetary inspector Jett Rocket is sent out to stop the rogue robots. As Jett arrives on the planet, the adventure already begins.
NE: How did the team manage to technically pull off such graphics, especially considering the file size limit on WiiWare?
ML: First of all we developed a custom ‘shader’ system which supports all the hardware tricks you can do on the Wii. So we could realtime preview all those Wii shaders in our 3D application. That was a big help to cut down iteration time and to test as many effects as possible.
As you may know the Wii graphics hardware has no pixel shaders like the PS3 or XBOX360. Nonetheless you can achive stunning results when you wrap your mind about the special abilities of the Wii. One thing the Wii we can do very well is to combine many textures very quickly. So we designed our materials like you would create layers in ‘Photoshop’. An important addition was that many textures were realtime generated and feed back into the shaders. With this techique we were able to create stunning materials without wasting megabytes on giant static and animated textures.
On top of that we use many different techniques to allow stuff like reflective and refractive materials, softed shadows, animated ocean waves and spray, grass, heat waves, etc.
Finally the 40Mb limit on WiiWare isn’t a big problem. We were used on the DS to create games in 4Mb. You just have to use different approaches then used in most retail games.
NE: Shin’en was also praised for producing impressive graphics on the Game Boy Advance with Iridion and Nintendo DS with Nanostray. Is it easier or harder to do really groundbreaking graphics on WiiWare when compared to these other platforms?
ML: Thanks for your kind words.
I think its a bit more easy on the Wii. On the DS you didn’t had much possibilities. Your only weapon was simply to make the best possible textures and models. On the Wii you can invent many different techniques to make your vision come true.
NE: How many hours will it take to complete the game?
ML: This will depend greatly on your playing style, especially as there is some backtracking involved. However, you will need many fun hours to complete the game.
NE: Will there be multiple control schemes available?
ML: We kept the controls very intuitive, simple and responsive. There are no additional schemes and we don’t think there would be any need for them.
NE: Does Jett Rocket have any sort of online functionality?
ML: We decided to have as much content as possible instead of adding more ‘secondary’ features. We also think exploration based jump’n’runs don’t fit so well into online gaming.
NE: When can gamers expect Jett Rocket to arrive on the Wii Shop Channel? Do you have an idea about how much the game will cost yet?
ML: We hope only very few months will go by until the release. We want to keep the costs very low, to allow anyone to play JR. However, the final release date and costs are set by Nintendo.
NE: Shin’en has had a decent amount of experience with WiiWare, but hasn’t released a title for DSiWare yet. Do you have any interest in the service?
ML: We currently concentrate on WiiWare.
NE: Are there any other upcoming WiiWare projects you can discuss?
ML: Beside JR we have another very promising title in production. It’s in the racing genre. We will soon make an announcement about it.
NE: Your most recently released title, Art of Balance, just came out this past February 15th. Are you satisfied with how the title is performing so far in sales and critical reception?
ML: We are very pleased with critical and fan reception. Most ratings were 9/10. Just look at the video review on WiiFolder. That shows much fun you really have with AoB. Regarding sales it will take some time because the EU version just starts by next week.
NE: You’ve worked on a lot of titles over the course of the company’s lifetime; do you have a particular favorite? Or maybe one that was just really fun to develop?
ML: My personal hilight was ‘Nanostray 2’ so far but now its JETT ROCKET because its simply the best game we ever did.
Huge thanks to Manfred for taking the time to answer our questions!
