Nintendo Okie

Today we’ve got a conversation with Felix Bohatsch, CEO and Project Lead at Broken Rules.  He’s here to discuss their upcoming WiiWare title, And Yet it Moves. I’d like to thank Felix for taking some time to talk with us today.

First off, can you tell us a little about yourself and Broken Rules? Where did the name for your company come from?

My name is Felix and I’m CEO and Project Lead at Broken Rules, which doesn’t mean much in a three person team as we are doing everything very democratic. Still, we decided to divide responsibilities and I am responsible for ensuring that we keep a timeframe, that the game is of the high quality we want to achieve and that everything comes together nicely.
Our company Broken Rules evolved naturally during the development of And Yet It Moves, which started off as a student project. The more serious we got, the more we realized that a company will be necessary. We had deals to sign, money to organize and so on, so we decided to take the step and found our own company. It’s also a commitment from our side to really do professional game design and development and move on from our student status.
We all agreed on the name because we think it emphasizes a very important part of design, which is to always question the status quo and try to find ways to do things better. But we do want to stress that it’s not about a puberal-being-against-everything-state-of-mind but about consciously breaking rules that hinder development, especially ones that we have set ourselves.

I’ve played through part of the game and it is definitely a unique take on the platformer. For those who haven’t yet played it what can you tell us about the game?

And Yet It Moves is centered around the enhancement of players’ abilities in a 2D platformer. It basically is a jump ‘n’ run game with the added power to turn the world in 90 degrees intervals any time the user chooses to. This has clear implications on the game environment: walls become floors, tunnels may suddenly be used as downward slides and a stone resting on the ground may fall, becoming either a dangerous obstacle or useful object for catapulting.

To successfully progress through a level, a player must apply the physical consequences of rotating the world to the avatar, and to other moving objects, like stones, drops of water and branches, as well as to living things, such as bats, monkeys and much more. Through this we introduce more puzzle like challenges which is why we like to call our game a puzzle-platformer.

I’ve heard that the title is based on a quote by Galileo where he’s talking about the Earth revolving around the sun. Was this the inspiration for the rotation aspect of the game and what were some of your other inspirations for the game?

No, Galileos quote was not the inspiration of the game. We just found it after the prototype was finished and we like it because it’s a fitting title with enough ambiguity.

And Yet It Moves started as a proof of concept for a university course. Our supervisors constricted us to make a 2D game, which really helped a lot because we could focus on game design rather then technical challenges. So we posed the question of how can we give the player more abilities in a 2D space and that’s basically where the idea to rotate the world came from. Through the power of rotation we remove vertical limits and the player immediately has more freedom in a 2D space.

I can’t say any specific game that influenced us, but of course we played a lot, and platformers are a genre that I like very much, because they provide such a simple goal – getting from A to B – but there are a lot of ways to design the challenges to reach it.

The art style of the game is definitely unique, what brought about that design choice?

We are a team that consists solely of computer scientists and, even if we consider ourselves not to be typical technical students without any knowledge about aesthetics, etc., we didn’t have a dedicated artist on the team. So we tried to come up with a style that looks good and that we are still able to pull off ourselves. First we started thinking about doing everything in a rough – and as we later realized boring – pencil on paper look. But it felt too empty and became way better when we started to add photos, which naturally evolved to the collage idea. What was important for us was to stay true to a rough and analog look & feel. This proved to be quite tedious though. Making the levels look good took a lot of effort. Next time we might go for a more digital and procedural look

The game has received a lot of praise based on the PC release. How has the process been in bringing the game to WiiWare?

What really got people talking about our game was being part of IGF and IndieCade. Only through these festivals could we get the attention that also motivated us to try and build a full version of our game. Being part of one of them acts kind of like a seal of quality and it’s way easier to get into contact with partners and distributors. Through this we could get our PC version out on Steam, Greenhouse, etc. and we also got into contact with Nintendo before the PC/Mac launch. Actually Nintendo saw us at IndieCade 2008 and contacted us if we wouldn’t want to bring And Yet It Moves to WiiWare.

With the PC version of the game you control everything with the W,A, and D keys as well as the arrows to rotate the world. Can you talk about the controls on Wii?

There will be different control schemes for the user to choose from, probably four. The one that is definitely going to be in, is a classical one, using buttons on the Wiimote and, if preferred, the Nunchuck or the Classic controller. I guess anyone can see how that one will work.

We are also trying to use the unique features of the Wiimote to workaround issues players had on the PC. We see two main problems: at the start players always have a problem to anticipate how the world will actually turn when they press the button, and they have trouble getting the correct timing in fast-paced situations. Both of these issues can lead to frustration.
In one control style the player holds the Wiimote in a horizontal position, like a NES controller, walks with the Control Pad and jumps with 1 or 2. Tilting the Wiimote will result in rotating the world. For some people this gesture helps setting up a link between the controller and the world and thus results in fewer wrong turns.

The two other control methods, we are looking at, both involve pressing and holding a button to freeze the world and all objects that are currently in it. Both will also require the Nunchuck to walk and jump with the character. But what differentiates them is that one uses the motion sensors and the other the pointer to rotate the world. We hope that the functionality of being able to pause during rotation and preview how the world will be rotated, will help people to better understand the mechanics.

We are actually also looking into supporting the Motion Plus to get better results out of our gesture recognition.

What are some of the differences between developing a game for the PC and developing for a console?

On the PC everything is a bit more open and free. When we started working on the Wii version we were surprised at all the bureaucracy that’s necessary to get a game on a console. A lot of stuff needs to be checked and approved, there’s rules for programming but also for offices, communications, etc. So basically all of a sudden one has too look out for a lot of things which you can normally safely ignore on the PC.

Can you talk about some of the difficulties in moving the game to consoles? And on the flip side some of the things that were easiest?

It’s been mostly a technical challenge. We have never before worked on any console so we are not used to such a strict environment, where you have to watch everything you put into the game. More importantly we have never really optimized on the PC/Mac version, which resulted in quite high system requirements, but that was not such a big problem on these platforms. Going to Wii, with it’s underpowered hardware, meant we had to do a lot of rewrites and performance improvements. But what is really causing us headaches right now, is getting all our stuff into the limited memory. Working on such a dedicated hardware with a closed SDK brings different challenges and requires a deeper understanding of what’s really going on.  Thankfully the documentation is really good and if we had questions we always got immediate answers from Nintendo.

Because we use the same engine on Wii as on PC/Mac all our levels and scripts were loaded correctly almost immediately, which saved us a lot of rewriting. Still we had our share of problems with the engine on Wii as well.

What brought on the decision to develop the game for WiiWare over the other console’s downloadable services?

Once we had Steam and Greenhouse on board as distribution partners for PC/Mac we started thinking about going for the console downloadable channels. Actually we could have imagined going with any one of them, but we never really knew how to approach them. Which made it even cooler when someday an email from Nintendo reached us, asking if we want to bring And Yet It Moves to WiiWare. We didn’t have to think long about it and are happy about our future channel.

Has Nintendo been helpful during the process?

Yes, they have. I mean, they still are a very big and thus bureaucratic company and they are not really used to deal with small, indie studios yet. Everything in their process is geared towards big studios, but I have the feeling that this is changing and will get better. All our direct contacts there were definitely very helpful though!

Are you worried, with the supposed casual audience on Wii, that a game that is this unique might be overlooked?

Well, I don’t think it will be picked up by everyone that has picked up the Wii just for Wii Sports and Wii Fit (although that would be awesome . But for it to be successful it doesn’t need to as well. We will be happy with quite a lower number.

Actually, I hope it will be picked up by people that have bought a Wii originally and quickly lost the interest due to all the shovelware that’s on it. But that mainly depends on how well we and Nintendo can reach our audience. I think it’s more likely that it will be overlooked because of the Wii Shop experience, which does a bad job of showing what’s new and what’s cool, and the lack of interest the gaming audience shows for the Wii and WiiWare.

I think that there are quite a lot of interesting indie games coming to the system soon, so I hope all of us together will help raise awareness for the platform.

Will there be any online features for the Wii version?

It’s still not set in stone but it seems like we don’t have the resources to put our onlnine leaderboards into the WiiWare version in time.  To tell you the truth, the online leaderboards on the PC/Mac version are only really used by a handful of people, so we don’t see it as such a big priority to be included.

Are you going to be adding anything that wasn’t featured in the PC version of the game? Possibly new levels or some two player mode?

This is also not set in stone, but it’s very likely we will have a few bonus levels added to the Wii version. These will be focused on the more hardcore players and will have quite a high difficulty. Actually we currently think of them more like challenge rooms.

What can we look forward to in the future from Broken Rules? Do you have any projects going on right now that you can talk about?

We are starting to think of a new project, but we rarely have the time do think about or work on it. It will be a downloadable game again and it will stay in 2D, so much is for sure right now.  The truth is that we have to focus all our resources to finish the Wii version and only after that, when our heads are free again, can we really start designing a new game.

Can you talk about a release date and pricing yet for WiiWare?

No. The technical difficulties we are struggling with are of a kind that it’s quite hard to figure out how long it will take to fix them. We do hope we can finish it this year though and then go through the approval process which will make a Q1 2010 release quite likely. But I’m not even very sure about that.

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That’s all we have for now.  I’d like to thank Felix once again for joining us and you can look forward to more coverage of the game here at Nintendo Okie.

All screenshots are based on the PC version of the game.