We're fans of Woah Dave! here at Nintendo Life; it's not easy to release a chaotic retro-style arcade cabinet experience for $5 while delivering fun and value, but developer MiniVisions seems to have pulled it off. Available now on the 3DS eShop in North America, it's published by Choice Provisions — formerly Gaijin Games — and a fun diversion on the portable though, it seems, is unlikely to make the move to Wii U.
Perhaps that's understandable considering the type of game it is, but Dan Adelman — formerly the head honcho for the download game scene at Nintendo of America and now running his own business — has shared the revelation that he asked to studio about a Wii U version; he was told it was unlikely as it would require re-development in a whole new engine, such as Unity or C++. That was that.
Adelman took the opportunity, however, to brush up on his programming and re-create the game in Unity himself. He used version 4.2 to match Wii U support — though Nintendo's system does now support the improved 4.3 — and got cracking; 4.2 did cause issues with the concept of jumping through a platform and landing on it, due to limited options with collision detection, a problem solved in 4.3. Below is a segment of this blog entry and a screen of the end result.
So essentially I made a 3D game with an orthographic camera. For the different objects in the game, I just used the default shapes in Unity – cubes, spheres, etc. I planned on swapping them out with the real art assets later, so there was no point in my trying to recreate those by hand. This is what the final version wound up looking like.
Unfortunately Jason Cirillo, designer of Woah Dave!, didn't get around to sending on actual assets, making this the final version of Adelman's project. In a charming end to the development, however, Adelman's two daughters helped him finish it off with sound effects.
We recommend reading the whole blog entry for some interesting insight into the process, even if the end result is, in Adelman's own words, "a turd that looks like Woah Dave!". You can download it and try it yourself on PC, however, by downloading it here.
[source dan-adelman.com]
Comments 18
i have no idea what this story is about.
@gage_wolf Omg you read my mind
I read this 3 times and it still makes no sense
I have no idea why people have no idea what this story is about.
I understand the article.
Heh. This is cute.
I don't get what people don't understand about the article. I understood that perfectly.
@gage_wolf can I join your club? I must've reread the second paragraph like five times and this whole article just made my head asplode. Glad it's not just me. But seriously what is this about? D:
Ah unity, so easy to make games, so hard to make pretty
Wat.
This needs better editing or orginization or something. All I got was a game couldn't be ported so Dan Adleman made a bad version to prove it could be but it couldn't because there was no art which there actually was but wasn't sent but no sound was sent either and the game for Wii U is for download on PC and its an official game and Nintendo Life enjoyed Woah Dave but its not coming to Wii U?
I feel like I entered the Twilight Zone.
I'm not familiar with Woah Dave but that was not necessary to understand this cool article
I agree this article is weird, but I actually think I did understand it.
@Prof_Clayton
"This needs better editing or orginization or something. All I got was a game couldn't be ported so Dan Adleman made a bad version to prove it could be but it couldn't because there was no art which there actually was but wasn't sent but no sound was sent either and the game for Wii U is for download on PC and its an official game and Nintendo Life enjoyed Woah Dave but its not coming to Wii U?"
Hahahaa! Fantastic summary!!!
I was able to decode the article easily enough. The real question is, why was I doing double-takes on sentences to establish what the hell the author meant? I felt like I was proof-reading an essay.
....so either people can't read here at NL, or I have the same brainwaves of the writer. This article made perfect sense.
Maybe people do not understand the article because it's just a small anecdote rather than a news article with some woah effect.
One line summary of story: Former Nintendo employee creates proof of concept port of 3DS eShop game for Wii U.
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