Nintendo on how they make games, fun is the most important aspect, amiibo
Gamasutra has several quotes up from producer Risa Tabata and Kensuke Tanabe, who work with external teams at Nintendo. Tabata has been involved with games such as Metroid Prime while Tanabe has been with the company for nearly three decades.
While speaking with Tabata and Tanabe, Gamasutra asked about how Nintendo tends to make its games, working with external developers, and even amiibo. Continue on below for their thoughts.
Tabata on what it’s like to work with Nintendo…
“First, the basic idea is to have the fun element of the game. As long as we can see that, we can move forward with that game. There are cases where we will start with using documents to lay out the plan, but this time we thought it would be nice to get the feeling of the game, so they were able to come up with a prototype fairly quickly.”
Tanabe on how Nintendo makes games…
“Nintendo, itself, I believe we create games in a very unique way. First, we don’t create a lot of documents when we go through the development of a game. There are companies that I know that have a huge stack of documents listing up basically the things they want to incorporate in the game.”
– Some documents are necessary to get off the ground but Tanabe says that “Nintendo has its own way.”
“We don’t start a project until we know what’s going to be the main core of that project. Once we know what’s going to be the baseline, the core of that game, the fun element of it, then we start to create the prototypes and play around with it, and start adding elements to make it a fun game — what we can do to make it a fun experience. In that process, obviously, we have a lot of ideas that will get passed through, and some of them will get dropped or moved forward.”
“Among all of these things that we do to come up with a game, by simply creating one game it will be extremely difficult for a development company to understand the importance of that.”
“And that’s mainly the reason we tend to work with [developers] for long periods of time. So we can get them to understand the philosophy and idea behind the process we go through at Nintendo. And for those companies that end up understanding our ideas, and agreeing to work that way, those are essentially the companies that will work with us for the years to follow.”
– Still “there are cases where that my not apply”
– Zip-Lash’s development was “very smooth”
– Nintendo suggested that Vanpool join the game’s development
“Just like Skip, they like to take that approach on unique types of games. We thought that having that collaboration between these two companies would be a good fit on this game.”
Tanabe on the Chibi-Robo!: Zip Lash amiibo…
“The idea here is to get the people and the market to take a look at the Amiibo and how cute he is, and say, ‘Oh, if you buy this Amiibo, you get a game too!’ or vice-versa, the other way around. To show appealing how the character is, we wanted to show how cute Chibi-Robo is. Using Amiibo is the best way that we can use.”
Tabata on how she thinks amiibo-based games should be made…
“What’s rewarding is that when you touch the Amiibo onto your system, when you see that actual character popping up in your game, it’s the most rewarding thing that players can feel.”
– The challenge with Chibi-Robo is that he’s the main character, and “there’s already a Chibi-Robo in your game screen, so if you touch the Amiibo and make another Chibi-Robo pop up, there would be two of them. That’s not the best situation!”
Tanabe on what he thinks of the drive to put amiibo support into the lion’s share of Nintendo’s games…
“This is not going to be my representation of Nintendo as a company, but my own opinion. I feel like if we create a game that’s supposed to take advantage of Amiibos, then in that case, it’ll make an impact on the game development itself. Personally, though, I don’t feel the necessity of having every single game has the need to be compatible with Amiibos.”
