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Nnooo on how the idea of Spirit Hunters Inc. came about
This is an Aussie-Gamer interview with Nic Watt from Nnooo...
Aussie-Gamer: How did the idea for Spirit Hunters Inc. come about?
Nic Watt: The idea for Spirit Hunters Inc came about when I was on holiday doing some really nice nature walks near Montauk Point in the USA. One thing which struck me is that a lot of people drive up to the car-park for a nature walk, eat some sandwiches and then at most spend five minutes walking near the car-park and then drive home. I wondered if you could create a game which encouraged kids to want to explore the real world and hopefully spark their imagination to such a degree that they want to go and explore these beautiful parts of the world!
The idea originally started as a game where you would take photos of insects and plants and then use them to battle each other. I quickly realised that for us to work out which insect was which would be really hard... It wasn't until a Nintendo Developer Conference that the idea leapt to the next stage. At that conference they were talking about all the cool things you could do with the Nintendo DSi and one of those was using the camera to work out the colours which are around you. Hearing that immediately sparked my imagination and I thought "Wow! We could use that system in an AR game..."
From there I thought a lot about what you would be hunting and battling and Spirits seemed like a really good choice. Everyone already knows about ghosts and spirits and the fact that they are potentially all around us and invisible so it seemed like a good fit to be hunting them down.
Ghostbusters definitely had some inspiration as I was a big fan of it as a child. However I wanted to make sure we used the concept of hunting, battling and capturing spirits in our own way and not something that just felt like a rip off of another franchise. To that end we spent a lot of time working on the battle mechanics and touch interactions.
We feel that AR is unique in the way that you are directly interacting with something in the real world. So instead of just moving and firing bullets at the spirits we really wanted to make you feel like you were interacting directly with the spirits. This is why we have abilities which allow you to flick fireballs, tap and hold on them to drain their life, slash them with a frozen slash and so on.
Aussie-Gamer: How did the idea for Spirit Hunters Inc. come about?
Nic Watt: The idea for Spirit Hunters Inc came about when I was on holiday doing some really nice nature walks near Montauk Point in the USA. One thing which struck me is that a lot of people drive up to the car-park for a nature walk, eat some sandwiches and then at most spend five minutes walking near the car-park and then drive home. I wondered if you could create a game which encouraged kids to want to explore the real world and hopefully spark their imagination to such a degree that they want to go and explore these beautiful parts of the world!
The idea originally started as a game where you would take photos of insects and plants and then use them to battle each other. I quickly realised that for us to work out which insect was which would be really hard... It wasn't until a Nintendo Developer Conference that the idea leapt to the next stage. At that conference they were talking about all the cool things you could do with the Nintendo DSi and one of those was using the camera to work out the colours which are around you. Hearing that immediately sparked my imagination and I thought "Wow! We could use that system in an AR game..."
From there I thought a lot about what you would be hunting and battling and Spirits seemed like a really good choice. Everyone already knows about ghosts and spirits and the fact that they are potentially all around us and invisible so it seemed like a good fit to be hunting them down.
Ghostbusters definitely had some inspiration as I was a big fan of it as a child. However I wanted to make sure we used the concept of hunting, battling and capturing spirits in our own way and not something that just felt like a rip off of another franchise. To that end we spent a lot of time working on the battle mechanics and touch interactions.
We feel that AR is unique in the way that you are directly interacting with something in the real world. So instead of just moving and firing bullets at the spirits we really wanted to make you feel like you were interacting directly with the spirits. This is why we have abilities which allow you to flick fireballs, tap and hold on them to drain their life, slash them with a frozen slash and so on.