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.

Woah Dave

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]