Mekazoo dev talks GamePad controls, release date

A portion of a Nintendo Life interview with James Hoag of The Good Mood Creators...

NL: Can you talk about any GamePad specific functionality?

JH: We're going to keep it focused on the single-stick controls, then as we're developing we're going to look into stuff. We know the GamePad has some uses for it. Just being able to play Mekazoo on the GamePad screen is nice, but the touch sensitivity could work really well and it may be just another control scheme option that we can give people.
One idea is to clean up the Wii U's display a little by allowing the HUD to be on the GamePad so you can just look down and see what set of animals you have. We will be doing a lot of exploration into that and maybe how that even helps out in co-op multiplayer. But, until we get some of that stuff lined out, we can't make any official announcements. We love the GamePad for its extra functionality, and really for me I play most of my games on the Wii U while my wife is watching Netflix, so I can still be connected and playing EarthBound while she's trying to use the TV. We're looking into all of those functionalities to make sure we have it resolved by the time we launch.

NL: Is there a release date or window for Mekazoo at this time?

JH: Our announcement right now is early 2016. We were aiming to launch it this year but it's getting delayed for development reasons. Internally we just want to make it as good as it can be. We're still young in the industry so we feel like we kinda mis-stepped there a bit and got ahead of ourselves, but we're keeping it at early 2016. Hopefully, by the end of this year, we'll have a firm release date. That's our goal: to be so close to done with it by the end of this year that we can say 'for sure, this is the month, this is the day,' but working with all of these new companies we want to make sure everything is lined out right. We want to be able to say 'it's coming out on this day, thanks so much for waiting, we hope you love it.'