About the item creation system... designwise, it started out as a complex matrix of items that rewarded experimentation and expression to create unique items that users could feel good about discovering... somewhat similar to item synthesis in Dark Cloud. During development, we struggled with a lot of intentionality problems as it was a fine line between making the user feel good about MacGuyvering stuff together and umm... wasting the user's time with pointless fruitless work. This was a hard balance to achieve, so we decreased the size of the matrix. Eventually, we got to a point where we just were not satisfied with the item creation system because it felt too much like pointless work. We spent a lot of time refining the other design aspects of the game and sadly, item creation took a backseat to things like combat, player direction, movement, camera, metronome, and special interactions (minigames and bosses). So towards the end of development, we simplified this system to something that won't annoy people. I personally think it is a better system than what we had originally planned.
As for waggle... yeah.. waggle. I really hate waggle! I happen to agree with IGN about that issue. Don't developers realize that people's arms get tired after swinging that wiimote for an hour? YES, they do. During one point in development, there was no waggle in the combat system. Attacks were done with a button. A combination of focus testing and feedback from various sources found that a higher percentage of people would rather waggle than button mash. Also, we ran out of buttons. Think of it like this... look at your wiimote+nunchuck. Now imagine the actions we have in the game: block, roll, move camera in four directions, shoot, jump... all of these actions need to be reachable by human hands in combat situations. The + and - buttons are awkward to reach, so that leaves B, A, dpad, c, and Z. In the end, a combination of focus testing and the button situation along with overwhelming pressure from a lot of important people forced us to go to a waggle control scheme. This personally made me very sad. IGN's article only confirmed my feelings about the matter, but it is late in the project and changing things now would be a huge risk to finishing the game within our budget. But here's the deal: as somebody who hates waggle, a lot of devs on the team made it a point to minimize the impact of that:
1) Combat is strategy based... The AI can be relentless. if you play the game like Dyanasty Warriors, you will die a lot
2) There is a three hit combo in the game... you only need to swing the wiimote once per hit... there is a generous input window that will accept your swing and buffer that input as feeding the next swing in the combo.. similar to buffered attacks in Tekken/Street Fighter/SoulCal. Swinging once per about 0.8 seconds is sufficent. Any faster and you are wasting your energy.
3) You have options other than melee. This is specifically because we don't want you to waggle all the time. Your wiimote's reticle is intended to be a major part of your combat repertoire. In fact... your reticle-based attacks are what separate Mushmen's combat system from most platformers out there. Most people will not notice or care about attack cancels and such, and the reticle-based combat was made for most people.
About framerate... yeah, few Wii games are packing in the amount of texture/geometry/animation/AI/physics/particle/lighting density that we are... We're really utilizing every aspect of the Wii's hardware and a lot of effort is being spent on optimizations at this point in development. Take a look at the environmental detail on most Wii games and compare that to what you've seen in Mushroom Men. There is a reason people use really simple textures and models on most Wii games. We decided to push that reason, and it's pushing back. That being said, framerate is not an optional thing for us. We will get our framerate to 30fps minimum by the time we ship.
The game is still in development, and we are burning it close to the wire. I hope you'll be happy with the final outcome. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears were spent on this game, and I hope that people do not take their biases against Gamecock out on us. We are our own entity separate from Gamecock, and Mushroom Men is our baby, not theirs.