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Nyamyam on Tengami's realism, says Nintendo is great to work with

by rawmeatcowboy
17 September 2013
GN Version 4.0
A portion of an ONM interview with Nyamyam's Jennifer Schneidereit...

ONM: How realistic is Tengami? For example, in the LEGO games, everything that TT Games build for the game has to be able to be built with real LEGO. Is that the case with the pop-up books and paper puzzles? Have you made sure that things move as they would?



JS: The pop-ups are entirely authentic and could be rebuilt as real world pop-ups. Our structures are a little bit more intricate than you would create in real life, simply because our paper has infinite strength and we don't have to worry about paper thickness and weight. Just a few months ago we teamed up with pop-up artist Rebecca Sawyer who has replicated some of our game scenes as physical pop-ups.

In order to make digital pop-ups, we spent an entire year researching pop-up theory as well as developing our engine and toolsets. Phil created something that we call the 'Paper Kit', after figuring out the math of physical pop-ups. The 'Paper Kit' is an editor that works similar to LEGO. You have several fold types and can attach them to each other to make a digital pop-up. The 'Paper Kit' ensures that all the attachments are valid and legal. It is quite a large topic as you can imagine and we explain this in more detail on our blog.

ONM: Tell us about working with Nintendo. They seem pretty open to indie developers these days. Do you like what they're doing with the eShop?

JS: Nintendo have been great to work with. They contacted us about bringing Tengami to the Wii U eShop last year and after we went through the developer authorisation process we received dev kits within a week. They are even more actively reaching out to indie developers now. It is a big change from the Wii days.

One thing that is great about the eShop for small developers is that there are still relatively few games for it, which hugely helps with visibility. On top of that, Nintendo are doing a good job at curating it. Overall I like the eShop, but it baffles me how slow it can be to browse the games and switch between details for a single game and game list. I think Nintendo are aware of this and are continuously striving to improve it.

Full interview here