Stepping On

In the second part of our interview with Nikitova Games' director of development, Jon Hare, he talks more about the first titles that will be rolling off the production line from the end of this year.

Jon Hare: That actually came about from a contact that already existed in Nikitova, who had been talking to Destination [the US publisher] for some time, they'd had a big conversation about what was available. [The game's published by Zoo Digital in Europe]

No, basically it depends on where you are as a developer, which rung on the ladder you're standing on in terms of pushing forward on those platforms. For us, it's new, it's our first game on the Wii, so you look for something that's good. As long as the money is reasonable and the project looks interesting, then you can do it. At certain stages in your evolution, that is your situation, and that's where we were on that format at that time.

But to be honest it's a very good license. ShowTime in the US is like Sky Sports in the UK, so to get their boxing game is a good thing. It's an interesting title to do, because fighting games rely on split-second timing. When you cross that with the Wii controller - and the way in which it reads the controller isn't quite what as you'd expect it - it's quite a challenge, as you'd probably notice with the Wii Sports game.

It's more like a sports game as you'd expect to see it, with proper model boxers, proper lighting - it's presented very much as a modern licensed sports game would look like. We're representing Show Time, so presentation is more centred on regular sports than Nintendo's take on it - it's a more realistic look.

It's quite interesting, especially on the DS, because we started off having the controls just on the stylus, and now it uses the buttons as well, but you can literally draw the punches on the screen.

And with the Wii we're innovating by having two controllers next to each other but not split screen, so they're next to each other. The Wii allows for so much innovation. From a design point of view there's scope to do so much stuff, it's just a question of how much you do.

On these titles? God, there's so much you could do. There're about eight new ways to control a game that we've not had before, just the Wii controller, if you stopped to think about how innovatively you could use it. Whether or not they're all commercially viable is another question of course.

But the challenge for people is going to be in getting the balance between modern standard animation and the freedom that the Wii controller allows you. Because although you can have the freedom on the system, there are some limitations on how you can actually read the input from it. And mixing that with very detailed animation is hard, which is why on the Wii Sports games Nintendo chose to separate the hands from the body - it's the arms that are the hard bits.

Yes, the game's called Casper Scare School, and it's based on the characters in that film. He's got to learn to be scarier, not so friendly, and so he's in school to learn that.

This one's just on DS, but again this is a nice innovative game for younger children. Basically you have a teacher who's trying to teach him to be scary, so if you help people out you have to do it behind his desk. You can run around while the teacher's not looking, but you have to be back at your desk when he turns around.

Actually as a game designer this is the most innovative game I've worked on for ages because with sports games, they're quite rigid. But with this, once you've got the basic characters and environments set, you can do what the hell you want.

Yeah, what happened with this game is that first of all I sat down with the team, the lead programmer, the lead artist, to talk about what the game would do. And then I went away and wrote up a 25-page design document, handed it to the publisher Blast [part of Mastertronic], they made one or two comments, and we went to see the license holders. They said they liked it, so we just went away and made the game.

The game's basically an original game, but the characters just happen to be Casper and some of the people from the film. I think there are chances to do many original things with licenses, if you approach it in the right way and are sensitive to the feeling of what that license is about, then you can have all the freedom in the world. You just need a bit of common sense.

This game's actually going to be the first of a number of general titles with film and TV tie-ins that we're planning.

Well the first of those was something I was contacted about, by someone who was looking for somebody to talk about a game design to. It was basically about a series of scientific tests about various things, such as spatial awareness on-screen and so on, and they thought it might make a good game.

So, I had a look at the tests, which were a series of point-and-click events on a PC, and I felt that it would certainly work on the DS and possibly the Wii as well. There's a good trend for brain training games at the moment based on tests that people have just made up, but as it happens this idea comes from the other direction - they are tests actually used to assess the performance of your brain, to see if you have problems in some areas, or of course high performance.

I think so, and it's endorsed by a Cambridge University professor.

This is with a German developer called Vheno Media, and they have a character called Moorhunh. We've said that we'll take that character, as long as we can find people interested in that character, which I think some German characters will be.

He's the kind of character who could feature in a variety of different games, from skiing, to karting, or hunting and so on. So we have a licence to make any kind of games we'd like to on the Wii.

Yeah, this is an original game designed by me for the DS, and there haven't been too many of those out in the past 15 years. So this, from my personal point of view, is my favourite one.

The story is that you play the role of a security guard in a shopping mall, and you have a bank of screens from different shops, which flick around between places. Occasionally somebody will grab an item and steal it, and when that happens the camera will freeze on their face.

Then when you see all the people leaving the shopping mall, you have to identify the thief before they can leave. If you remember the Where's Wally? books, it's kind of like that, but you've got different people at different times you have to pick.

But it's an original game, I don't think I've ever seen anybody do this before, and it's just a bit of fun really.

I think so. I think people will be interested in different things, but we've got a variety of subjects. Really to me that's what is exciting about these formats, because they give us the ability to be creative in different ways, and we're approaching it with flexibility.