You might recall that we covered The Next Penelope a while back, and were quite excited about the fact that it was being ported to the Wii U.
Playing like a cross between F-Zero, Micro Machines and the classic French/Japanese cartoon Ulysses 31, this combat racer was the work of one man - Aurélien Regard - who was very open about the fact that he couldn't port the game himself and was using a third party for the job.
Sadly, Regard has now revealed that The Next Penelope won't be coming to the Wii U. He cites the difficulty of moving a HTML5 title to Nintendo's console, and explains that more than one company had attempted to port the game, but to no avail.
On the bright side, Regard says that his communication with Nintendo of Europe was incredibly positive and that there's an outside chance that The Next Penelope could come to the Switch.
Here's his full statement:
(I'll be the most transparent I can, please read until the end if you have a bit of time. Also, please excuse my experimental English, I wish I could be more subtle with words now)
Is Penelope cancelled on WiiU?
Sadly yes (not my decision, coming from the company who proposed to port the game and invested months and money in it).
Even if the game is a very small one, being made using html5 and pushing it hard definitely makes it nearly impossible to port on consoles without recoding everything from scratch (= more expensive than the money a niche game like mine could ever bring back).
That's the 3rd very capable company to throw in the towel after investing in this project ("3.5th" if you count my own attempt during the first year using the official Nintendo html5 framework).
These news made me super s(/m)ad, but I know they're very good people and sincerely tried their best.From here, I since have done everything I could to find other solutions, even with the WiiU now being discontinued ( < hint: this doesn't help to find new partners). In my mind, the game was made for a Nintendo console from the beginning, so... well, you get the idea. It's not pleasant. I also would like to add how people at Nintendo Europe have been supportive and helpful with me. It sounds like PR bs? It's not. Having the feeling you're talking to (good) humans is very much appreciated, rare, and they rock at this. (Guys, if you're reading this at some point, me and my clunky English are very grateful for your time!) Now, some other brave/cuckoo/masochists friends of mine are trying to port Penelope to the Switch, but nothing sure yet. It could be as technically difficult and never happen, so please don't hold your breath on this (I hold mine but shhh). This is absolutely *not* an announcement or something. I so learned my lesson here, let's not announce anything until it's 100% finished now. Speaking of lessons, the new game I'm working on for more than one year now is made using Unity, so this situation never happens again. I can't wait to show some fresh stuff in the coming months so we can share some more joyful news : )
Cheers, and thanks a lot for caring! Aurelien.
How do you feel about this news? Were you looking forward to playing The Next Penelope? Share your feelings with a comment.
[source pastebin.com]
Comments 28
I like his S(/M)ADNESS
Shame, we'll just have to make do with F-Zero & it's many other similar games.
Nicely communicated, all the best to the dev. Would be nice to see this title on Switch.
Bummer - add this to the neverending list of indie games that have been cancelled on WiiU for "unforseen circumstances" (aka, the Switch): Limbo, RIVE, forma.8, Bloodstained, Stardew Valley, Yooka-Laylee etcetera. I don't know about you but the Switch isn't even out yet and I already hate it because, apparently, the only effect it produced is to discourage indie developers even more from releasing on WiiU...
@DanteSolablood Reading your comment there just gave me a vision that F-Zero appears in Friday's presentation and I jumped up in joy shouting in celebration.Could be a sign
@spizzamarozzi and those are just the games we know about. We will never really know how many games were planned and canned or 'switched' behind the scenes that didn't even get to the stage of public announcement. Are we all ready to admit that the Wii u was a Devs nightmare by now at least though. Whilst Nintendo and their 2nd party allies have done great things with the hardware, I've lost count of the complaints about how it was so difficult to programming for. It should never be the case that your brand new (well at one point it was😉) console can't run current generation games properly.
Fingers crossed that the switch leaves this situation behind.....
Everyone's dropping the Wii U, which isn't great, but hopefully that really does translate into them all moving over to Switch.
PS. I love the look of this game, and particularly impressive is how the developer has made all 2D art look like it's polygonal 3D.
@spizzamarozzi I completely agree, I was so excited to hear about the NX before it was announced as the switch and then because I am a wiiU owner I really feel I'm being screwed over. First because I pretty much already own the games that are going to be ported over to the switch and secondly because of all the games that were currently in development for the wiiU being "switched" over to the new console. The more news I hear the more I hate the new console.
Sick of hearing cancelled WiiU games. This - to be fair - looks no great loss however. Desperate though to hear ABOTW details regarding the WiiU version I trust is still in the calendar.
Ah shame but I really do appreciate the transparency and he sounds really genuine. Three studios couldn't get it to work and he has some friends who are still trying? That is some tenacity but also just really effed up that it's been THAT difficult. Hopefully the Switch era will be the promised land of easy ports and put the dark days of hardware cutting down developers who actually WANT to support Nintendo behind us.
@Raptor78 yeah, I though - Nintendo may have dropped support, but at least we have indies to make the transition from WiiU to Switch as painless as possible. Next thing we know, all the indies are dropping support too.
Of course this wouldn't be a problem if I had 200+ quid to fork out for a brand new console, but in the last 4 years I bought 2 current-gen consoles from Nintendo (a WiiU and a 3DS XL) and it would be ludicrous to buy a 3rd current-gen console in 4 years simply because "plan A didn't work as expected"...
If the new system doesn't sell as expected and the trend is just "replace your current system with a new one", I expect them to announce an NX2 two years from now and pull support from the Switch. That would really make me laugh...
Meh, the game looks boring anyway.
Game was fairly good. Sadly not as good as I was hoping though. I say move on to the next thing, bring that to the Switch. Keep on moving forward.
Adding to my dev "meh" list.
Here we go again....
At least he explained clearly what was the problem. The Wii U's lack of compatibility with well, almost every game engine is a pain.
Nintendo Switch MUST be easy to port to!
Hm...another Exodus from Wii U to Switch. Hopefully those indies can make their promises.
Shame, it has a great art style, seems like a cool game and Aurelien seems like a really cool guy. Seems to be more of an issue with Construct 2/the HTML-5 framework than the Wii U itself, it probably would have worked fine if it had been made in Unity. Hyperlight EX was made in Unity I believe and seems to run fine on the new 3DS despite having more going on than The Next Penelope.
Who knows, maybe his next game will make it to the Wii U, I'm sure games will continue to sell on it for a while yet.
@spizzamarozzi forma.8 is still coming the devs said it's coming this February, ksp is still coming, rive still coming and limbo is unknown.
This is a great game. I play it on PC and enjoyed it a lot. It is made with the same engine I use for my games so I understand porting it to Wii U is not an easy task. It is not impossible, but very hard, people usually prefer to learn Unity instead and be done with it.
I bet that Iwata-san could've ported it to Wii U over a weekend!
Probably the best thing in this article is hearing that the developer switched from HTML5 to Unity. Looks fun, so I hope it comes to the Switch!!
I don't care about this game at all, but the more games on the Switch, the better.
get it on steam for a couple bucks
Lol, so Wii U not only can't handle Unity, it can't handle HTML5 either? I didn't realize it was that outdated... Well, at least the NS will have no problem with either. Pretty much every modern API will be scalable for it. People shouldn't blame the developer for "concurrent" hardware being too outdated to handle a modern API, that's not their fault. Blame Nintendo for the Wii U's outdated chipset.
Sounds like a really genuine and cool person. I hope it makes it to the Switch.
It can't be a surprise surely? At this point investing in the Wii U doesn't make fiscal sense. If you're looking forward to any games just hope they're coming to the Switch and press on. Support with your wallet at the next appropriate juncture.
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