Wii got gaming

>> Two Montreal game developers discuss
the process of creating games for
Nintendo’s newest platform

ÜBERTRICKS GALORE: EA’s SSX Blur

by ERIK LEIJON

Since launching last November, the Nintendo Wii not only has gamers talking, but developers have been excited about tackling the new console and its famous motion-sensor controller. Well-positioned to speak on the issue are a duo of local producers, Ben Mattes of Ubisoft Montreal and Alex Hyder of EA Montreal. Mattes was the producer of Prince of Persia: Rival Swords, a remake of PoP: The Two Thrones, which was designed specifically for the Wii, and Hyder produced SSX Blur, the latest title in the snowboarding game series.

New games, old faces

In both cases, it was their first experience working with the new Nintendo console, which provided some interesting challenges, especially when it came to figuring out how to use the Wii controllers. Rival Swords, which was in development for around six months, is the same game as Two Thrones, which Mattes also produced.

“It would have been fiscally irresponsible for Ubisoft to jump into the Wii on a brand like Prince of Persia without testing the waters,” he says of the decision to not build an entirely new Prince of Persia. Gamers who played Two Thrones will not be getting a completely new game, but Mattes thinks the controls, where the motion-sensing technology controls the sword movements and the camera, will impress even those well versed in the series.

SSX Blur re-uses some old tracks and characters from previous SSX titles, but most of the content is new and the controls were built from scratch. Choosing a similar route to Ubisoft by incorporating the nunchuk analog stick controller for the left hand and the remote for the right hand, snowboarders move by tilting the nunchuck and pushing the analog thumbstick, and pull off tricks with the remote.

“We prototyped off the top at least three workable control schemes and we kept coming back to the one we stuck with,” says Hyder. “(Using the analog with the motion-sensor to turn) was meant to be an added tweak, and we found it worked well. When you use the analog stick on the nunchuk, it’s like fine control. You rotate the remote to carve from one side to another but when you need to be really precise, when you need to grab a rail, you use the thumbstick and you hit it square on.”

Eureka moments

Mattes and his team also worked with several different control schemes, and stumbled upon the idea to control the camera by tilting the controller. They found it worked well when simultaneously moving the character with the analog stick. “It re-lit the experience of our testers when they first were playing video games and they would jerk the controller instinctively to make Mario jump. They were using the remote peering around a corner and that was a real eureka moment that such a sense of immersion was working,” he says.

Both developers ran into the same issue that has plagued many early Wii titles: straddling the line between complexity and accessibility. In Rival Swords, the prince has a bevy of sword manoeuvres at his disposal, but swiping the motion-sensor randomly is equally effective. Ditto for SSX Blur, where impressive tricks could be executed without bothering to memorize the control patterns. It’s a concern moving forward, but Mattes and Hyder worked to make it easy for beginners and rewarding for experts.

“We did not want to make a combat system that was so realistic and motion-sensitive that they perfectly mirrored the combat that was going on on-screen, because then effectively the player would have to be a trained fighter in order to be able to do anything,” says Mattes. He says he’s pleased with how attacking enemies with the nunchuk and remote had a similar rhythm pattern to drumming, and how if gamers wanted to take the time to learn the combos, they would be able to execute some very elegant moves.

SSX Blur has the luxury of über-tricks, where gamers must specifically replicate the motions being done on the screen, but Hyder warns that, “You don’t want to get overly restrictive. We thought about it because you know it’s going to happen that people are just going to randomly wave the controller. At the same time, you don’t want to make it too difficult, so there’s a tuning thing there. At the end of the day, if you do initiate spins at random, as long as you nail the landing, then why not?”

Some practice required

Although easy to pull off tricks, SSX Blur’s turning controls were difficult to understand initially, and required a lot of practice. Hyder says the major lesson learned from Blur, which will benefit his latest project currently in development, the Wii dance game Boogie, is to better explain to gamers how to play.

“The Wii was new to everyone, gamers and developers alike,” he says. “To do it over again, we would have made a deeper and clearer tutorial and a set of instructions so that people wouldn’t have that learning curve to just figure out what to do.”

Had he been given more time to work on the game, Mattes would have liked to explore the speed-kill mode, where the prince sneaks behind an enemy and, by timing button presses, kills the enemy with one hit. Mattes says he would have considered changing the use of buttons to actually recreating the prince’s sword moves with the motion-sensor.

Now that both games have been on the market for several months, both teams have had the opportunity to compare their work with that of their competitors, and to see how others have interpreted the new technology. Hyder was curious about Actitivison’s Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam, a skateboarding game that has obvious similarities to snowboarding. By the time Downhill Jam hit stores, the bulk of Blur had already been made, but Hyder and his team were impressed by the different approach taken by California developer Toys for Bob, where gamers hold the remote horizontally like a classic controller. Mattes, on the other hand, is looking forward to Nintendo’s own titles, including the upcoming Super Mario Galaxy.

BUILT ON RIVAL SWORDS: Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones