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SnowCastle Games on working with Nintendo, Wii U status and release date

by rawmeatcowboy
25 September 2013
GN Version 4.0
A portion of a Dromble interview with Bendik Stang, co-founder of SnowCastle Games...

D: Festival of Magic was shown earlier this year in a Nintendo of Europe video highlighting upcoming games for the eShop. Describe your relationship with Nintendo – do you find them to be easy to work with? Are you happy with their current policies regarding indie developers?

BS: We met with Dan Adelman and Tim Symons at GDC in San Francisco in March this year. Before GDC we had no hopes for developing for the Wii U, but the meeting changed this. Coming back from the conference we found ourselves fast tracked through the certification process. It was our first experience working with one of the 3 big ones, and we feel really well taken care of.

At PAX Prime a few weeks ago, we met with Mr. Adelman again, and talked about our need for some extended eShop features. We would like a lot of stuff that the eShop currently does not support; like public beta testing and an in-game shop for the DLCs. He told me that they wanted to accommodate our needs, but it would take some time to get all the features in. So hopefully by the time we are ready with FoM, those features will be added to the eShop.

D: Do you have the game currently running on any Wii U development kits? How much work does Unity help cut down in porting the PC version to Wii U?

BS: We have the Wii U dev kit up and running, and until this week, we have only focused on getting a stable PC/Mac build ready for PAX, Publishers and Investors. Now that we have accomplished that, we have just started working on the Wii U version of FoM. It sure could use a little plug-and-play functionality, I must say, but with some support from Nintendo I’ll bet that we have the current build running on the Wii U next week.

D: How far in completion is the game (percentage % wise)? When we can expect Festival of Magic to release on PC, Mac, and Wii U?

BS: While we’re only in early alpha stages of development, we have spent a lot of effort developing the tools and the systems we need for production. If everything goes as planned the first two episodes of FoM should be ready within Q4 2014 – so within a year.

Full interview here