NanoAssault Neo details, dev philosophy, Wii U hardware potential (Shin'en interview)

[EatChildren]

Not Enough Shaders has a pretty thorough interview Shin’en regarding their upcoming Wii U project Nano Assault Neo. The interview covers the project, Shin'en's business philosophy, Wii U hardware, and a few other bits and pieces.

It coves a whooole lot, and is worth a read, but here's a few points of interest from the interview.

Nano Assault Neo
- Online leaderboards, 'survivor' mode, local two player.
- Tunnel sequences from 3DS version not present in Neo, instead replaced with tunnel 'races'.
- Uses the 'C-Engine', an engine Shin'en has used on around 17 games.
- In two player mode, the GamePad camera captures the second player (on the GamePad) playing, and displays this image on the TV for the first player to see. Image captures at 30fps. Can be disabled.
- 'Missions' take place of achievements. Missions success is ranked online.
- 100mb download size.
- 5.1 LPCM surround sound audio.
- Hoping for launch day and low price.
- Loading times almost reduced to zero.

eStore/Digital
- Made profit on WiiWare, but felt the market was too small. Feels the 3DS eStore is a sign of Nintendo taking digital more seriously.
- Feels Nintendo is "listening to feedback", including from developers.
- Had no restrictions from Nintendo in terms of size, content and gameplay for their digital titles.

Wii U Hardware/Tech
- Hardware avoids "typical bottlenecks", such as RAM latency.
- GPU "quite open".
- Hardware has good optimisation potential, and components well balanced.
- Have had no problems with the CPU/GPU combination. Feels they're a "good match".
- GamePad streaming and camera capture do not put a burden on the CPU/GPU.
- Nano Assault Neo using a few tricks that are not possible on current generation hardware. States the modern Wii U GPU is capable of effects that can make Wii U games look better than any game on current generation hardware.
- Audio DPS used for 3D audio and lowpass filtering.
- Excited to see what developers do with the hardware over the years.

Design/Company Philosophy
- Big focus on framerate. Always aim for 60fps.
- Enhancements made to the C-Engine for one game can then be used in other games on other platforms.
- Enjoy independent, smaller working versus larger, contractual working. Allows for full ownership of properties and engines, and full control of project direction.
- Influenced by arcade games from the 80s/90s.
- Enjoy first party Nintendo games. Thought Journey was really great.
- Happy with their relationship with Nintendo.
- Developing Jett Rocket for 3DS. Hoping to release it in the next few months. Planning another Wii U game, to be announced early next year.

The entire interview can be read here.

 

[TriGen]

Good read. It's nice to hear devs continue to state that Nintendo is being good to work with regarding the eShop.

 

[LOCK]

Company philosophy is awesome.

 

[grimshawish]

Since its been discussed a few times on gaf (not about this game specifically), some info on why theres a lack of online mode:

Why is there no cooperative or competitive online mode? Many of your games like Nano Assault or Fun! Fun! Minigolf don’t have this feature requested by players. Will you change this approach in the future?

In reality there are almost no modern shoot’em ups at all that work online. You need about 50x the data-rate compared to a standard 3rd person shooter game and very short latencies which can’t easily be hidden. You also require near pixel perfect collisions which doesn’t tolerate any lags or corrections. It’s very difficult to make that work without degrading the games quality, and I don’t even mention the much longer development cycle. For Fun Fun Minigolf we didn’t saw a good appealing online part.

In general, instead of serving mediocre online modes in our games we concentrate on making the core game better. However, for future projects we will certainly add more online features where appropriate. For example, a title like “FAST – Racing League” would have of course online play features on Wii U.

Also liked the 60fps comment. Another great interview on NES though with a WiiU developer.

Also, the 'secret' to a surviving studio?:

How do you see the future for your studio? Any plans to expand or open other offices outside Germany, as some others have done? Or do you prefer to remain reasonable in size in this risky industry, with controlled objectives?

Since we started in the late 90′s, we have seen many studios come and go in Germany. You do a good game, grow bigger, make it AAA and after one or two flops you are gone if you have bad luck. We didn’t want to go that way. Instead of growing, we invested in our software tech and quality of life. Our future is also bright because we have enough resources to make any needed changes and the digital market is on the rise. It’s nice as well to have a steady cash flow from the many games we have already available online. And thanks to our fans, we have enough motivation to do it better with each release !

Who knew.

 

[slaughterking]

Company philosophy is awesome.

Indeed. I have not found any of their games interesting enough to play them myself, but their technical goals are definitely admirable.
Nano Assault has my attention, though. I think I'll try that one out.

 

[Phazon]

I've played a few games of Shin'en and while not spectacular (as in 85+ games), they are almost always fun and pretty good.

Great to hear that devs can use a lot of Wii U stuff out of the box and that hybrid solutions are not needed at this moment.

 

[StreetsAhead]

Once they guarantee a Japanese version, I'll be all over it. The 3DS retail game was released here, so here's to hoping.

These guys always sound like good guys when I read interviews with them too.

 

[radcliff]

Fantastic interview! Thanks for posting. Good to hear Nintendo took great steps so that GamePad streaming doesn't tax the CPU and GPU.

 

[watershed]

Good read. I'm a fan of their work even if it some times feels generic. I love their dedication to technical excellence and smaller projects.

 

[bluehat9]

Think they switched the link on you since I got '404 - Page got lost!' and had to go to their front page to find the story.

Reading now.

 

[Dynamite Ringo Matsuri]

Damn, really wanted to read the original interview but the page comes up as 404 for me.

Good summation on all talking points though EC. Good to hear about the specialized functionality on the GPU, here's to hoping some sort of tesselation solution is present.

 

[Currygan]

intelligent and capable developers. Love these guys. And well if they say the WiiU can make games look better than current gen...well you got to trust it since they're hardware-squeezing masters

 

[rpmurphy]

I'd love to see what a Nintendo-Shin'en collaboration would look like. Shin'en has great technical expertise, and matching that with Nintendo's game design could be quite a combination. Pretty cool that they were able to leverage an engine that they created for the DS game across even three newer hardware platforms both handheld and console.

 

[walking fiend]

Since its been discussed a few times on gaf (not about this game specifically), some info on why theres a lack of online mode:
.

And people will still keep fucking that incompetence chicken

 

[Currygan]

I'd love to see what a Nintendo-Shin'en collaboration would look like. Shin'en has great technical expertise, and matching that with Nintendo's game design could be quite a combination. Pretty cool that they were able to leverage an engine that they created for the DS game across even three newer hardware platforms.

Starfox would be...like, the best shooter ever

 

[Nibel]

- Big focus on framerate. Always aim for 60fps.

The only thing I would critisize about them is their art design; other than that they are awesome and I hope that one day they'll make the jump to some bigger projects since they do a lot of things right that many other big companies don't even think about.

 

[Joseph Flemming]

Love these guys, their philosophy, and their games. I'll pick this up at launch!!

 

[vagabondarts]

I love these guys, and their games.

 

[Dynamite Ringo Matsuri]

When testing our first code on Wii U we were amazed how much we could throw at it without any slowdowns, at that time we even had zero optimizations. The performance problem of hardware nowadays is not clock speed but ram latency. Fortunately Nintendo took great efforts to ensure developers can really work around that typical bottleneck on Wii U. They put a lot of thought on how CPU, GPU, caches and memory controllers work together to amplify your code speed. For instance, with only some tiny changes we were able to optimize certain heavy load parts of the rendering pipeline to 6x of the original speed, and that was even without using any of the extra cores.

This statement reminds me of Michel Ancel's surprised reaction to the U handling the original unoptimized textures in Rayman Legends without any drop in performance. It's nice to hear that the console seems to be well thought out after all of the CPU FUD.

This statement sounds a bit more reassuring as well. I hope porting won't be a major issue in the future:

We can’t be too specific on the Wii U hardware but you can’t compare anyway an OpenGl/DirectX driver version to the actual Wii U GPU. I can only assure that the Wii U GPU feature set allows to do many cool things that are not possible on any current console. The Wii U has enough of potential for the next years to create jaw-dropping visuals. Also remember the immense improvement we saw on the PS3 and XBOX360 over the years. I’m really excited to see what developers will show on the Wii U in the years to come.

 

[tkscz]

Still reading it, but I had to quote this.

A DS game is not that much different from a Wii U game from a technical point of view. In fact it is much easier to create a great Wii U game than to create a great DS game because you have so much more resources. Doing stuff still as efficient as we were forced to do on the DS is not a drawback but a benefit for our games. Every year we add a few large new features into our engine. For instance, FAST – Racing League on Wii had problems to maintain solid 60fps when having two players splitscreen. For that case we added a CPU based Occlusion culling system. Since then every game we do can use that system, no matter if it’s on 3DS or Wii U. As the complete engine is powered by an own designed scripting language there are no boundaries. New code and modules are exposed to the script and then they can be freely used.

That's how you separate a good developer from a great one.

 

[The Boat]

Good stuff, love these guys. NES is awesome.

 

[marc^o^]

Nano Assault Neo is oh so day one.

 

[metalslimer]

GamePad streaming and camera capture do not put a burden on the CPU/GPU.

Well this a pleasant surprise. Color me interested to see the next batch of Wii U titles.

 

[Davey Cakes]

Their dev philosophy is admirable. Best of luck to them with further eShop developments!

 

[Diddy Kong]

Awesome read!

 

[marc^o^]

We also use its camera to capture the first player and show his face on the TV along with his vehicle. This is a gimmick but adds a lot of fun !

I love gimmicks Now if we could have this feature in a future online game that would be awesome.

 

[Celine]

Shin'en guys are awesome.
When I asked some media/detail about their cancelled Gba racer for unseen64 they were ready to help.

Can't wait for nae and jett on eshop.

 

[Phife Dawg]

Thanks, very interesting read.

We are happy that our games are frequently considered to stand a bit out of the crowd. A big factor is that if it’s possible, we want to see our titles run in 60fps. Having a game running in 60fps is of course a challenge when everyone else uses 20-30fps and you want to look even better than those games. 60fps improves also many aspects of the gameplay although players don’t usually make this connection. Sloppy controls are often the result of having a game at a low framerate, though it depends a lot of the genre. Many developers create their games and as an afterthought they try to make it run at a certain framerate. For us a good framerate is always the start of any project and we keep it high until everything is finished. As our background comes from 8bit and 16bit computers we tend to keep our code fast and simple. We try not to over engineer.

Love these guys!

 

[Blades64]

Sounds nice! Excited to see what the second batch of Wii U titles look like!

 

[Boerseun]

I love this company. I will honestly buy anything and everything they put out. They show a Nintendo-like love for what they do, without sacrificing their personal happiness or sense of satisfaction.

Grimshawish quoted this earlier:

Since we started in the late 90′s, we have seen many studios come and go in Germany. You do a good game, grow bigger, make it AAA and after one or two flops you are gone if you have bad luck. We didn’t want to go that way. Instead of growing, we invested in our software tech and quality of life. Our future is also bright because we have enough resources to make any needed changes and the digital market is on the rise. It’s nice as well to have a steady cash flow from the many games we have already available online. And thanks to our fans, we have enough motivation to do it better with each release !

How often do you hear from employees at big dev houses about their low quality of life, long hours, stress, hearbreak and depression?

Shin'en have cracked it! They get what's important in life. And all the best to them!

- 100mb download size.

Surely you mean 100 MB.

Thanks for posting this interview, by the way. Awesome stuff all around.

EDIT: I realise they give it as 100 Mb in the interview. I assume that's a typo, though. No way is this game only one hundred megabits. Or is it ... ?

 

[OG_Original Gamer]

Are they suggesting that the way memory is set up that its speed and really low latency, can move textures in and out of memory fast enough making it possible to see higher resolution textures surpassing what is expected from the gig available for games?

 

[Boerseun]

I just finished reading through (and rereading) the interview. Here is a short wishlist of what I would like to see happen:

- All their WiiWare games get HD makeovers for Wii U eShop.
- All their WiiWare games get 3D makeovers for 3DS eShop.
- Virtual Console releases of their pre-Wii titles.
- All future games get dual 3DS/Wii U releases (if at all possible).
- Have Nintendo hand them one of their classic properties for revival, something like Mach Rider, Devil World or Gumshoe.

That would be a good start, I reckon.

Are they suggesting that the way memory is set up that its speed and really low latency, can move textures in and out of memory fast enough making it possible to see higher resolution textures surpassing what is expected from the gig available for games?

I do not fully understand the second part of your question. But perhaps the answer you're looking for is that Wii U comes with a comparatively huge amount of edram, which is something hardware makers havn't always given high priority to.

 

[Oddduck]

Excellent interview! Lots of information in the full interview.

 

[z0m3le]

Amazing interview, the questions that he asked were very interesting.

Are they suggesting that the way memory is set up that its speed and really low latency, can move textures in and out of memory fast enough making it possible to see higher resolution textures surpassing what is expected from the gig available for games?

Basically it's about slowdown thanks to memory speeds. less frame rate issues and yeah larger textures, this is all directly compared to current gen consoles so that is pretty exciting. I'm highly excited for this console, I just wish I could of gotten a preorder. I'll likely have to wait until Spring now.

Also, it's quite interesting they talk about the Gamepad not being a hindrance to the system. Just recently we found out that the ARM coprocessor is multicore (from Wsippel) I wonder if it's not only handling the OS (as Starlett did in the Wii) but also the streaming done to the controller. This could easily explain the limit of 2 Gamepads. It's certainly interesting to think about.

 

[Tenki]

My wallet is ready for Nano Assault EX and Nano Assault Neo. Both day one.

 

[Smiles and Cries]

supporting these guys day one

 

[Hero of Legend]

Wow:

We feel very honored to be compared to Factor 5. In fact, without their efforts on SNES we never would have dared to develop for Nintendo consoles ourselves. At this time that was something unthinkable for us, a few young guys from the demo scene. We are flattered when people suggest us for brands like F-Zero or Starfox. And you never know who is reading such comments too.

We're being watched! :O

 

[darkness_s]

Wow:



We're being watched! :O

F-Zero developed by Shin'en would be awesome.

 

[kitsuneyo]

Company philosophy is awesome.

Seconded. These fellas have the right idea.

Keen to try Nano after reading this brilliant interview.

 

[Blades64]

F-Zero developed by Shin'en would be awesome.

They should just make both. F-Zero and Star Fox are perfect fits for these guys.

 

[kitsuneyo]

They should just make both. F-Zero and Star Fox are perfect fits for these guys.

Dunno. Star Fox needs to be AAA and they have a small team. Still prefer Platinum and believe it'll happen.

 

[Smiles and Cries]

Amazing interview, the questions that he asked were very interesting.
Basically it's about slowdown thanks to memory speeds. less frame rate issues and yeah larger textures, this is all directly compared to current gen consoles so that is pretty exciting. I'm highly excited for this console, I just wish I could of gotten a preorder. I'll likely have to wait until Spring now.

Also, it's quite interesting they talk about the Gamepad not being a hindrance to the system. Just recently we found out that the ARM coprocessor is multicore (from Wsippel) I wonder if it's not only handling the OS (as Starlett did in the Wii) but also the streaming done to the controller. This could easily explain the limit of 2 Gamepads. It's certainly interesting to think about.

Often read the GamePad being the leech of the Wii U power potential from IdeaMan's posts early on. Like without the gamepad use the game would have been better looking but with it, it shares in the work load to stream. Guess this is not really the case here.

I have not read much about an ARM coprocessor before have not kept up with the Specs thread much though. Where is that located?

 

[jaypah]

All this "day one" crap is pathetic. These dudes ain't nothing special.

Lol J/K these dudes are total class acts. Did they start out in the demo scene? Their approach to development makes it seem like it. What they pulled off on the Wii was ridiculous.

 

[ipukespiders]

I hope NAN is available on Nov 18th in NA.

 

[z0m3le]

Often read the GamePad being the leech of the Wii U power potential from IdeaMan's posts early on. Like without the gamepad use the game would have been better looking but with it, it shares in the work load to stream. Guess this is not really the case here.

I have not read much about an ARM coprocessor before have not kept up with the Specs thread much though. Where is that located?

This interview is conducted by Ideaman ('IM' he pretty much agrees with me on this point too, we are talking in the NEShaders IRC) I think it could be that early dev kits didn't have streaming through the ARM coprocessor but either way the GPU and CPU still draw the scene on the Gamepad, so his point is still valid. It's not like the gamepad has it's own GPU and CPU, simply the streaming to the device is done through the co processor, or at least this is my guess.

Also I haven't really studied the motherboard so I don't know, however I trust that Wsippel is correct on the multicore co processor.

 

[Agent X]

Great interview!

 

[JAYinHD]

I already planned on getting this day one so this makes me even more geeked to get it now. Plus, I love me a good shooter

 

[Smiles and Cries]

This interview is conducted by Ideaman ('IM' he pretty much agrees with me on this point too, we are talking in the NEShaders IRC) I think it could be that early dev kits didn't have streaming through the ARM coprocessor but either way the GPU and CPU still draw the scene on the Gamepad, so his point is still valid. It's not like the gamepad has it's own GPU and CPU, simply the streaming to the device is done through the co processor, or at least this is my guess.

Also I haven't really studied the motherboard so I don't know, however I trust that Wsippel is correct on the multicore co processor.

so not as much a drain as before but still a factor, I get you.

 

[Datschge]

Nice thorough interview, thanks. I really like this group of people, the last answer brings home well what makes them so special.

Whenever people start demanding they should expand I have to laugh. We need many more of such "tiny" but highly capable developers in the game industry (and creative competition among those). The huge developer armies high budget gaming is not sustainable both financially and creativity wise.

 

[nextgeneration]

Wow, I am impressed with these guys. Will be keeping an eye on all their games in the future now!