Development News, Development Features - Page 10 of 13

It's Power Up time

One relatively unknown fact about Wii U, aside from the official information and broad range of speculative rumours, is that Havok and Nintendo have an agreement for the 'middleware' provider to make its game engine technology available to developers on the system. Havok's development tools and technology are prominent in many...

Patience and perseverance needed

Just recently we spoke to Trent Oster of Beamdog to learn about WiiWare from a developer's perspective, though his experience had ultimately been negative. Something that we touched upon was that the eShop on 3DS seems to be a better download platform that shows improvements over the Wii Shop, though specific details...

Who will they be?

Shigeru Miyamoto — creator of Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong and more, of course — has dropped a seriously big hint we'll see new characters from Nintendo very soon. The Guardian asked Miyamoto if there was a particular game or style he wanted to work on, to which he replied: I don't have a big list of ideas I want to realise, I...

Took in PC too

Masahiro Sakurai started work on Kid Icarus: Uprising so long ago there weren't even 3DS development kits, according to a new Iwata Asks. Sakurai told Nintendo president Satoru Iwata that his Project Sora team made do with the other hardware available, including Wii: At first we didn’t have the Nintendo 3DS development kit, so we...

Fingers in many pies

Shigeru Miyamoto must be a busy man. When he's not saying Angry Birds would have been better on DS or having weird game ideas, he's actually working. At the moment, Miyamoto is juggling several projects, including a few for Wii U. Speaking to El Mundo in the same interview he used to confirm

Is it, isn't it?

Welcome once again to the best game show on the internet, How Powerful is Wii U? While recently Darksiders II developer Vigil Games said Wii U is "on par" with current generation consoles, now a band of anonymous developers have spoken out to Games Industry.biz about the machine's power, claiming it's not got quite as much...

Commander Video loves Nintendo

The WiiWare service has, despite its detractors, been host to some terrific download games, including six BIT.TRIP titles from Gaijin Games. While these titles have been released at retail with BIT.TRIP COMPLETE and BIT.TRIP SAGA on Wii and 3DS respectively, the developer's latest project, Runner 2 - Future Legend of...

Quotes from the master

Shigeru Miyamoto knows a thing or two about making games. As general manager of Nintendo's Entertainment Analysis Division he's worked with staff including Yoshiaki Koizumi, Takeshi Tezuka and many more. One of his protégés is Koichi Hayashida, director of Super Mario 3D Land, who took to the stage at GDC 2012 yesterday and...

Blue shells aren't going anywhere

Mario Kart 7 is now well established as one of the games to own on 3DS, contributing to an important revival for the handheld in the Holiday period. We'd wager a lot of gamers are still revving up their karts for some racing, which says a lot for the series' appeal to gamers of varying experience levels. IGN has...

All change

The Wii U controller features 3DS-like Circle Pad sliders instead of the tilting analogue sticks that have been the industry norm since Nintendo 64. That wasn't always the case, though. An earlier version of the controller than the one we've seen included proper analogue sticks raised from the controller's surface, among other changes, as...

Handheld battle is getting serious

While 3DS has been enjoying a significant level of success in Japan in recent weeks, the recently launched Vita is struggling to make significant inroads into the market. It's very early days for Sony's handheld, but reports in Japan suggest that its slow start is already causing problems, and that Nintendo is set...

Now how about showing us?

Shigeru Miyamoto has been working on Pikmin 3 for years — we first heard of it nearly three years ago — but so far we've yet to see a single snifter of a teaser of a screenshot. Having worked so long on something so secretive, is Miyamoto in danger of losing his passion for Pikmin? Not on your Bulborb. Speaking to...

A simple port wouldn't cut it

Crystal Dynamics' big budget Tomb Raider is coming to HD consoles later this year, but it won't make it onto Wii or Wii U. In a recent podcast (as posted in the Eidos forums) the developer explained why Lara's latest won't come to Wii U: When we started developing the game we made a conscious decision that it was all...

There's hope yet

Late yesterday we reported the sad news that Konami is dissolving Hudson Soft, one of the industry's most experienced development companies. Although it's clear that Hudson will no longer exist as an independent entity, there's now hope that it may still retain its own brand and identity. Hudson released a statement on its website, translated by Andriasang, which seems to suggest..

A lot on his plate

According to an interview with Zoomin.TV, Shigeru Miyamoto is currently at work on an unannounced, original game. Miyamoto himself didn't say anything about the game, so we have nothing else to go on: no format, no genre and no hint at which of his hobbies it'll be based on. Miyamoto is still working on Luigi's Mansion 2 for 3DS...

Origin tails

The Tanooki tail is back in a big way this year, but it's time to take a look back at when and how it entered the Mario canon way back in Super Mario Bros. 3. Chris Covell's website has a translation of The Stars of Famicom Games, a 1989 book taking a sneaky peek at how Mario's greatest 8-bit adventure was created, from ideas to manufacturing. Shigeru Miyamoto, Koji Kondo, Takashi..

Baby-raising and family struggles

Shigeru Miyamoto's ideas come from all angles. Pikmin came from gardening; Wii Fit from his wife bringing home a new set of bathroom scales. We're almost afraid to ask about the inspiration of an idea revealed in a recently translated discussion all the way from 1989 (thanks to Siliconera.) The discussion in question takes place between Miyamoto and Dragon Quest..

It is inevitable

All the talk of Shigeru Miyamoto retiring or stepping down — neither of which he's doing, of course — got many thinking about Nintendo's future after its talismanic figure leaves. Miyamoto himself spoke to the Wall Street Journal blog briefly about company life after his departure, and acknowledges Nintendo must prosper without...

That's a lot of screens

When the Wii U was unveiled at E3 2011, we only saw it working with one touch screen controller, but according to an anonymous source speaking to Develop Nintendo is beavering away on supporting a second controller. Citing a "trusted game development executive", Develop says the Wii U codebase indicates that...