That passion quickly turned into game development, as Kage created a SNES-style game engine and began work on a personal project: a Final Fantasy 6 prequel. Next, there’s William Kage, a game composer who got his start making SNES-style tunes with instruments from Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6. It's more like a fun tech project." The Little Minigame That Could There are other people doing it, and I respect it, but…it's definitely not lucrative. There's not really a good reason to make games for the 3DS. "It was hard, but I think there's just a lot of nostalgia for the 3DS. "It seemed cool to have a Nintendo platform," he says, reflecting on his time as a 3DS developer. While proud of his work, Vincent also seems ready to move on, and is considering continuing making games for PC or even in VR after this. Overall, he seems relaxed about the entire situation, even though he's just submitted months of hard work right before a very dramatic deadline. Vincent is currently waiting to hear back from Nintendo following the submission of Automaton Lung, so he doesn't have a release date for it yet, though he hopes to drop one as soon as his game is approved. But there aren't as many unique features." The Switch is more like an Xbox that you can take on a plane with you. There are other things too, like the little pedometer…StreetPass…all those cool features made it unique and gimmicky in a fun Nintendo way. "The unique features on the 3DS make it cool to develop for, like the two screens and the 3D. "I don't think the Switch is as good as the 3DS, but it is better than the 3DS in a lot of ways," Vincent says. "Harold's Walk probably got more attention on 3DS than it would have on Switch, because there's just a flood of little games coming out on Switch all the time," he says. Why? He suspects the main reason was just because a single new game on the 3DS at that time was immediately noticed by anyone who happened to be looking for one. And yet, Vincent found a surprising number of people were interested in playing it. After all, he was releasing it at the end of 2021 - well after Nintendo audiences had largely moved over to the Switch. ![]() ![]() He didn't have any particularly high sales expectations from his first game, Harold's Walk. He's especially a fan of its StreetPass and 3D features, the former of which hasn't been possible to integrate into new games for a while, but the latter of which he feels has been "overlooked" by many other developers. When he started working on games during COVID-19 lockdowns, he opted to develop for the 3DS purely because he liked the console. Vincent's decision to develop games on the 3DS wasn't because of some calculated marketing decision, or because he thought there'd be an existing audience there at all. And all are proud to be a key part of leaving one last stamp on the 3DS and Wii U for the handful of remaining fans who still look for new games to play on either. And Dulay, a committed developer who was already working on a whole universe of games, took the closure of new game submissions as a personal challenge and is trying to release seven whole games across both platforms in the span of a few months.Īll three developers love Nintendo's aging platforms of an era now effectively over. ![]() Kage, who had been working on a full 3DS game when the deadline was announced, realized he couldn’t make it in time and instead worked to convert a minigame from within his original project into its own full-blown title to make it across the finish line. Vincent got into making games as a fun side project during pandemic-related lockdowns and did his best to finish a game he was already working on by the deadline. Sure, you might think, but who's submitting new games on the 3DS or Wii U in March of 2022 anyway? Well, at least three developers: Luke Vincent, William Kage, and Jerel Dulay, all of whom were in the final stages of submitting and releasing their respective games on 3DS and Wii U just as the deadline for submissions came and went.Įach developer started on their 3DS and Wii U games for very different reasons. With the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U eshops preparing to shut down in 2023, last week officially marked a quieter, but incredibly significant deadline: the deadline for developers to submit new games for either platform.
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