Vigil: Wii U to be "easy" to develop for
Although the developer was nervous about the new hardware at first, Vigil's Darksiders 2 Wii U demo took three programmers just five weeks to create.
"We got the word from corporate, 'Can you guys pull this off in time for E3?' And we were like … sure. We weren't really sure we could do it," general manager David Adams told GameInformer of the studio's Wii U tech demo of Darksiders 2.
But once the team got a handle on the Wii U's foibles, they found it quite accessible.
"You can tell [by] the way the software's organised, the way the APIs are written, very shortly it'll become an easy platform to developer for," Adams explained.
"From a pure programmer point of view, it's definitely a lot easier than, say, the PS3 was. It's probably on par with 360 as far as ease of API, simplicity of how you interact with the hardware."
"It probably took us a week to get our base libraries to where we could actually run the game on the console, without any graphics or anything, that's just getting it booting up," technical director Colin Bonstead revealed.
"And then there was probably another week and a half of just getting the graphics to a state where you could see something on the screen and we could actually play the game.
"Start to finish it took us about five weeks, from when we found about it to the last day before the show."
Vigil didn't have to change any assets from other versions, so the work was completed by three programmers, who enjoyed the chance to flex their creativity.
"When you work on something on Xbox or PlayStation 3, every problem has been solved, you just need to go search on the newsgroups, or email support," Bonstead said.
"[On Wii U] we were literally finding things and telling Nintendo about them. 'Hey how does this work?' 'Well, I don't know.' So we were finding the solutions ourselves sometimes. It was kind of like a new frontier."
Watch the full interview below.
Thanks, GoNintendo.