- He Tomodachi Life: Living the dream The development team spent “six or seven years” programming the Mii interaction system.
- Lead programmer Takaomi Ueno says it was “pure chaos”
- The team kept coming up with additional ideas over the years until it was finally complete.
Tomodachi Life: Living the dream Lead programmer Takaomi Ueno has said that one of the most challenging aspects of development was the Mii interactions and that it took about “six or seven years” to get it right.
In a new Nintendo Ask the Developer interview with the creators of Living the Dream, Ueno explained that designing the way the Mii characters interact with the game’s features was “not an easy task for the programmers” and took years to perfect.
This included features in the user-generated content (UGC) system, things players can create themselves, interactions with items, dialogue, and more.
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“The Mii characters would sometimes walk up and down in the same area, or several of them would try to use the same object at once… So we set rules for each of those unwanted behaviors, keeping the ones we thought were strange but fun,” Ueno said.
“After layering all those elements so that they wouldn’t fall apart no matter how they were combined, everything finally fell into place and made sense. Before we had those rules, it was pure chaos and really difficult to deal with.”
The lead programmer even admitted that there was a point where the team “thought leaving it this chaotic might be really fun (laughs).”
Art director Daisuke Kageyama added that the team kept experimenting “when it was pure chaos” without finding the “right solution” because they kept asking what players would like to see.
“It feels like we spent the entire project fine-tuning that balance,” said game director Ryutaro Takahashi. “(Laughs) It took a long time until the final vision was clear and we were able to say, ‘Now we just have to build it!’ We originally planned to finish the UGC tools in about a year and a half. But because we wanted players to enjoy the game simply by looking at the Mii characters, we came up with more and more ideas as development progressed.”
Programming director Naonori Ohnishi added, “Takahashi-san and the UGC planner kept coming up with ideas like, ‘We want this feature… oh, and this one too,'” before Takahashi revealed that the team “ended up spending six or seven years on it (laughs).”
The director explained that the team conducted playtests after the system finally got to a point they were happy with, and the response was “overwhelmingly positive, which was a huge relief.”
“Since we had struggled with it for so long, it was really comforting to know that people found it funny,” Kageyama added.
Tomodachi Life: Living the dream is now available to play on Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.
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