Shin’en praises Wii U dev environment, overall tech and large memory

Shin’en’s Manfred Linzner talked up the Wii U hardware in an interview with GamesTM this month.

First, Linzner noted that the console’s development environment allowed the studio to easily create a game – Nano Assault Neo – in a short amount of time:

“The Wii U development environment allowed us to go from zero to a great, polished game in only half a year. I think we never ever got so far so fast on a new hardware, and we’ve worked on a lot of platforms in the past decades.”

Linzner went on to compliment Wii U’s overall technology. Although the studio’s game is rendered on both the television and GamePad, “even then we were still able to maintain solid 60FPS without much effort on both displays.” Linzner also said that the Wii U’s large memory allowed for complete caching and practically eliminated load times:

“We decided to add a local two-player mode where one player uses the TV and the other one the Wii U GamePad. That meant the complete game world would need to be rendered twice for the Wii U GamePad display. That nearly doubled the burden on the GPU and CPU, but even then we were still able to maintain solid 60FPS without much effort on both displays. Then on top we even added camera streaming, so that the TV player can see the face of the Wii U GamePad player, which adds a lot of fun. We expected the additional camera encoding and streaming would add noticeable strain on the Wii U, but it was almost free. All this proved the system is very well balanced and allows developers without much effort, to use all the unique features. Another benefit of the Wii U is that the system memory is so large that we never have to load an asset again. Everything can be cached and load times are almost gone.”

Thanks to joclo for the tip.