KnapNok and Nifflas reveal Affordable Space Adventures for Wii U
KnapNok Games (Spin the Bottle: Bumpie’s Party) and Nifflas (Knytt Underground) have revealed their collaboration title for the Wii U eShop. Here’s what we know thus far, courtesy of a Gamasutra interview with Nicklas ‘Nifflas’ Nygren and KnapNok’s Dajana Dimovska and Lau Korsgaard:
– Uses the GamePad extensively
– Trying to make “an atmospheric, low-key, very suspenseful game that gets the players excited but a bit scared at the same time, and to have a game where a complex configurable vehicle is fun to figure out and control.”
– Technical stealth puzzles that you don’t see in most games
– Control a lot of the ship with the GamePad touch screen
– Interface will communicate the personality of the spaceship
– Scan enemies and configure the ship to avoid detection
– Ship can overheat
– Action never pauses when the player stares at the second screen
– Will need to pay a lot of attention to the UI
– Get lots of info from it about dangers
– “There will be some shortcuts, but the aim isn’t to not have to look at the UI.”
– “We aim to design puzzles that can be executed elegantly by only changing the ship’s configuration at safe locations with no time pressure.”
– “In occasions where actions need to be made while flying, the player should never have to jump between two different sub-menus.”
– Single-player and local multiplayer
– On using the Wii U hardware:
Lau: This is mostly the GamePad we are talking about here. I think we have seen very few games, also from Nintendo themselves, that actually uses the GamePad in a meaningful way. Hopefully we can show that the Wii U is great, and it can give you experiences you can’t get anywhere else as long as developers dare to design something exclusive for the hardware.
– Nifflas and KnapNok on making the game for Wii U:
Nifflas: I have no idea 🙂 I just want to make a cool game for it!
Lau: Ha ha, yeah, if we wanted to earn money I guess we shouldn’t be in games. It is really hard to make any sensible business rationales in this market. Yes, there are not that many Wii U consoles out there, but does it matter if there are 5 or 10 million units sold when we just need to sell some 10-20-30 thousand copies to be happy? As long as we keep our cost low, I think it is much more important to work on a platform that excites us than to work on the stuff that everybody else is doing.
– Playable at the GDC Play booth PL406 March 19th to 21st and at The Media Indie Exchange March 17th in San Francisco
You can find a whole lot more over on Gamasutra.
