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Black Forest Games positive on Nintendo experience, bringing all future games to Wii U, 3DS support teased
A portion of a Nintendo Life interview with Black Forest Games' Managing Director Adrian Goersch, Creative Director Jean-Marc Haessig, Technical Director Johannes Conradie and Producer Vladimir Ignatov...
NL: Can you tell us about your experience with Nintendo so far, in terms of initial developer approval, progressing with the project and approaching release?
Vladimir Ignatov: We’ve been approached by Nintendo in the first place, followed by a visit where they’ve presented us the console vision, positioning and their eShop design. Everyone was interested and the eShop intentions were a combination of the best practices seen in other digital shops. There’s a lot of control from the developer’s side in terms of pricing, sales and bundling, as well as transparency and accessibility for the users. There were some inspiring examples in front of us, like Frozenbyte’s Trine 2 Wii U, so we decided to give it a shot.
Getting the ball rolling for bringing Giana to the Wii U was easy. The paperwork was simple and straightforward, so we quickly got official Wii U developer status. We already got rigged with the development kits and received good developer support. It’s fair to say that we already had some experience with Nintendo consoles - see our Giana Sisters DS game.
From the development side, it wasn’t more effort to get Giana running on the Wii U than it was to port her to the X360. The TCR side was a bit simpler, but the low level engine side was harder. The Wii U has some PC-like dx10/dx11-like systems like geometry shaders, however, when we started working on the port, we already had our game released on the X360, and going from a console release to Wii U is easier since the consoles have very similar performance characteristics. Another helpful factor is the amount of overlap when it comes to controller support, interfaces, user management and suchlike (even though every single engine system needs to be rewritten to support it).
Approaching the release and setting up the eShop was again not that hard, the only stretch is that you have to deal with Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Europe as almost separate entities, requiring two separate builds (incl. different language packs and slightly different eManuals ). All marketing materials, banners, sell texts also follow simple yet slightly different guidelines for NOE and NOA guidelines. Finally, you have to wait for your builds to be checked and blessed by both NOE’s and NOA’s lotcheck divisions (the Nintendo QA division that makes sure the build is in compliance with Nintendo’s guidelines).
Luckily it took us only one resubmission to be compliant with Nintendo specs and be ready for release. Once the builds were approved, it was just a matter of a few weeks to be out live.
NL: Do you have any future plans for the Wii U, or even the 3DS?
Adrian Goersch: We are planning to bring every game we develop to the Wii U as well, and we are planning for simultaneous releases. So no delay for Nintendo fans. 3DS is something we would like to do for Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams one day.
Full interview here
NL: Can you tell us about your experience with Nintendo so far, in terms of initial developer approval, progressing with the project and approaching release?
Vladimir Ignatov: We’ve been approached by Nintendo in the first place, followed by a visit where they’ve presented us the console vision, positioning and their eShop design. Everyone was interested and the eShop intentions were a combination of the best practices seen in other digital shops. There’s a lot of control from the developer’s side in terms of pricing, sales and bundling, as well as transparency and accessibility for the users. There were some inspiring examples in front of us, like Frozenbyte’s Trine 2 Wii U, so we decided to give it a shot.
Getting the ball rolling for bringing Giana to the Wii U was easy. The paperwork was simple and straightforward, so we quickly got official Wii U developer status. We already got rigged with the development kits and received good developer support. It’s fair to say that we already had some experience with Nintendo consoles - see our Giana Sisters DS game.
From the development side, it wasn’t more effort to get Giana running on the Wii U than it was to port her to the X360. The TCR side was a bit simpler, but the low level engine side was harder. The Wii U has some PC-like dx10/dx11-like systems like geometry shaders, however, when we started working on the port, we already had our game released on the X360, and going from a console release to Wii U is easier since the consoles have very similar performance characteristics. Another helpful factor is the amount of overlap when it comes to controller support, interfaces, user management and suchlike (even though every single engine system needs to be rewritten to support it).
Approaching the release and setting up the eShop was again not that hard, the only stretch is that you have to deal with Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Europe as almost separate entities, requiring two separate builds (incl. different language packs and slightly different eManuals ). All marketing materials, banners, sell texts also follow simple yet slightly different guidelines for NOE and NOA guidelines. Finally, you have to wait for your builds to be checked and blessed by both NOE’s and NOA’s lotcheck divisions (the Nintendo QA division that makes sure the build is in compliance with Nintendo’s guidelines).
Luckily it took us only one resubmission to be compliant with Nintendo specs and be ready for release. Once the builds were approved, it was just a matter of a few weeks to be out live.
NL: Do you have any future plans for the Wii U, or even the 3DS?
Adrian Goersch: We are planning to bring every game we develop to the Wii U as well, and we are planning for simultaneous releases. So no delay for Nintendo fans. 3DS is something we would like to do for Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams one day.