LostWinds, a WiiWare game developed and published by Frontier Developments

To get a sense of the thought process behind making a WiiWare game ahead of the service's May 12th debut, we spoke by phone with Frontier Developments founder David Braben. His company's first such title, LostWinds, aims to put "the power of the wind in the palm of your hand" (using the Wii remote) as you guide young Toku (using the nunchuk) on a series of adventures to lift an evil curse placed on the land of Mistralis. Also on the call: Nintendo of America director of project development, who began to chime in halfway through the interview with some explanations that clarified the differences between how Nintendo has chosen to approach original downloadable games as compared to Microsoft and Sony. Read on.

David, what is your WiiWare project?

David Braben: It's a game called LostWinds and it's about the idea of a wind spirit that has been hidden away by a nasty guy called Balasar. But essentially looking at it as a game, it really allows us to do new things on the Wii. We now have Wii in the marketplace for a year and as a developer it takes a while to come to grips with a new system like the Wii; the wonderful combination of the remote and the nunchuck. It's an opportunity for us to do great things with the game.

It's the first game to come out of a process that we have internally. One of the great things about working as a software developer is it's full of really enthusiastic people who really love games and so they're itching to try out new ideas. And so we created this--what originally started off as a Game of the Week project where people would propose games and as our managing director described it, it's a bit like dipping a piece of meat into a piranha tank and anything that's left has to be pretty tough. [Laughs.]

So in that sort of fantastic but critical atmosphere, we put out these game ideas, and people suggest ways of doing it better and ways to modify it and all that sort of thing. This is the first game that survived, if you like, that process, but also had grown from lots of people's suggestions about how it can be made to work really well. And the Wii is absolutely perfect platform for it.

Who's the main character? What's the goal and what's the game play?

Where did you first find out about Nintendo's WiiWare service for original downloadable games? Yep, right here on Level Up, where North American president Reggie Fils-Aime exclusively revealed the company's intention to create a way to allow developers of all sizes, from garage band programmers to corporate behemoths, to develop games for digital distribution. Well, here we go again, eight months later, with another scoop: the first Q&A with Nintendo that delves into specifics about the WiiWare service, which will debut in North America on May 12th. During a phone interview late last week with Frontier Developments founder David Braben about his WiiWare launch title LostWinds, Nintendo of America director of project development Tom Prata sat in on the call to answer any questions that went beyond Braben's purview. You can read that interview in its entirety here, but we'd like to include in this post a few of the things that Prata had to say about WiiWare. Excerpts:

On file size restrictions for WiiWare titles: We are encouraging developers to make a game that is more compact in nature, and not have to let's say compete on--as it relates to the very large volumes--filing up maybe lots of disk space like you would see in a conventional retail type of product. The reason for that is that we want the WiiWare development to be more cost effective and have low barriers to entry to allow the content creators to create with that type of risk.

On WiiWare's pricing structure: WiiWare, like Virtual Console will support a variety of different prices for the consumers in terms of Wii Points. So we'll have content that is--just like we do with Virtual Console--for let's say NES or Super Nintendo 64 at different price points.

On whether or not there will be downloadable WiiWare demos: The intention is that the creators will create the game and we'll make it available on WiiWare after it passes certification. But we really don't want to impose kind of too many restrictions on developers, or too many requirements. As an example, in many cases we don't want to say just because people can connect to the Internet that they have to make a multiplayer via the Internet version, or Wii Connect 24 modes, or take advantage of all the types of features that are available. The key for us is not to impose too many restrictions on the content creators and allow them to create the content that and the features that they think are more suitable to express their vision of the product. And creating demos or having demos as a requirement is a very costly type of endeavor, so it's not a requirement from Nintendo.

Note: Nintendo's PR agency, Golin Harris, followed up with the Level Up staff after the Q&A to add: "We do not intend to have a ‘try-before-you-buy’ model that requires developers to create expensive demos. Nintendo plans to provide information on games similar to what Nintendo in Japan is doing with the Everybody’s Nintendo Channel where creators can share information on their game directly to Wii consumers."

To read Nintendo's press release in its entirety, click on the link below.

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