Mario Strikers Charged Post-Mortem Interview - Interviews

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Did all of the development happen here or was some of it shopped out overseas?

KY: Nope, everything was done in-house.

How many people did you have working on Charged at the height of its development?

KY: 35? Uh, including contract and testers it was closer to 45 at it’s peak.

That doesn’t seem like very many people.

KY: No, it’s not. We definitely wanted to keep the team small. I think Nintendo’s intent, their idea for development of games is to keep the development teams small. Strikers was about 45 people, too. I don’t think we brought in much more over the first version into the second one.

Does that help you remain more focused on what you’re doing?

KY: I think so. And one of the advantages of going through first to the second game was that the development of the second one went much, much smoother than the first one. Everyone basically knew each other, they were comfortable

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with how everyone else worked, everyone was contributing ideas. I think the smaller team allowed us to break things down into specific features and really focus on those things. We’d stand up things really quickly, everybody reviews it. “How’d that feel? Does it feel good?” Good, let’s finish it then. “Does it feel bad?” Okay how do we change it,

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how do we make it better? The team was really agile that way. And you can do that when the team that’s small. When it gets too big I think you run into some problems – it’s more difficult to remain agile and not have a bunch of meetings so that everybody knows what’s going on before you actually get on with it.

45 people at the height of development and a development time of 18 months, were you working killer crunch hours?

MI: The company prides itself on balance, we were just awarded the WorkLife BC award for work-life balance; Excellence and Innovation Award.

KY: To have that kind of structure in the software industry is unusual. That’s a result of trying to plan these things out properly; we try to buffer in as much time as possible…

MI: We don’t bite off more than we can chew.

KY: We definitely don’t do that. Everybody has it in their heads that we’re going to try to make the best product we can but we’re going to be reasonable about it. One of the big things we do here is say, “No” to ourselves. When features come up, things that we want to do, we’ll sit down as a group and ask, “Can we do this?” If it’s not feasible then we actually say, “No.” That stems into saying, “No” to the publisher. And Nintendo is actually good with that. We explain what we want to do and if this isn’t going to add anything to the game then why are we chasing this, that sort of thing. Success comes from that. We learned on the first one and it just folded right into the second one. We were able to plan everything out but there were a couple times at the end when we had a couple of Saturdays but that was just during the final stages. Nintendo was testing it and were sitting around waiting and when something crucial comes through that’s when we had to be ready. That’s what those days consisted of – it wasn’t that we were stuck with 500 bugs and two days to fix them all, everybody has to be here. It was never like that.

That’s amazing because some of the other developers I’ve spoken to, after crunch time they're wasted – they want to sleep for a few days.

MI: Planning, that’s the big thing. Games are a simple triumvirate and everyone knows the formula: time, features, and money. I think we use that well and we’re honest with the publisher – as a developer you have a responsibility to be realistic. You don’t want to over-promise on something you can’t deliver – you shoot yourself in the foot and burn your staff out. Then they don’t want to be part of your company. We could get better at it for sure, but Charged was the smoothest project I’ve worked on by far.

It helped us as well that we made a version of the game before so we kind of knew going into it what we needed to do to add features in because we talked about it at the beginning.

Just to take it back to the game for a minute, why aren’t there more animations for the Megastrikes?

MI: If there was a gameplay difference, there might have been reason to do it. You seen goal celebrations more than you see Megastrikes typically. But this is where the approval process with Nintendo comes into play. The Megastrikes push boundaries more than the crotch chop from Nintendo’s perspective because we we're morphing the character to a slightly darker version of itself, like Bilbo in Lord of the Rings – a switch from normal to slightly demonic looking. The goal for the Megastrikes was to mimic when an athlete goes into a “focus” moment, that’s what we visually wanted the Megastrikes to represent. Because we kind of change the character so drastically there’s a huge approval process. Concept them, send them away, they would come back with tweaks – you can’t really do this, you can’t do that to him, that’s okay for Peach… the crown might have been too angelic so we had to pull that away. Them managing their IP was a lot of the reason there were not more there – just the time to finish the Megastrikes was one of the more lengthy things due to the approval process.

I'm told I shouldn't ask some of these questions. I want to ask about a Mario hockey game…

[muffled chuckling]

The Striker Challenges… I’ve been trying to finish the last three. Is there some way for you guys to track completion of that kind of stuff? A certain amount of information would be available through the multiplayer stat tracking?

MI: We don’t pull that kind of data. At the time had an idea of bringing accomplishments online, but for the feature set of the wifi at the time… there was a lot of feeling around for Nintendo to figure out if that would be something specific to our game or would it be something that would branch to everyone else. We were really trying to come up with main features at the time that would allow developers

to do that stuff and I think that when Nintendo was asking for ideas that if you and another game had that concept but there was another nine that weren’t going to

do it, they would push that aside and maybe pick a feature set that applied more.

But we had those ideas for sure, like if you won all the Cups and completed all the challenges you come online and people could say, “Wow, this guy has completed the whole offline game; must be a good player.”

Like a gold uniform or something. But back to my original thought, is it possible to complete those last three challenges. Can anybody show me how to do it?

MI: The Yoshi challenge is probably the hardest because you only have 45 seconds and you’re down 5-nothing and you have to rely on Megastrikes to do that because your team is not filled with great shooters…

KY: They’re all beatable. We tested them to make sure, and not just once through.

So it is possible?

MI: We really tried to push the difficulty of some things. Maybe some places it might have been too far. A lot of people complained in the first one is that there’s no single player challenges; there’s no reason to really invest time unless it was for a Cup. I think it’s good to have a few things in the back of your head, “Geez, I’ve got two things to complete in that Charged game.”

Ken Yeeloy

"For me, when I’m looking at the reviews, I look more at the comments, rather than the scores, to see if it makes sense. Did you actually play this thing? I’ve seen a few reviews where they’ve made comments that make me say, “Wow, you’ve never played the game based on your comments."

Are there any ideas that didn’t make it into Charged?

MI: We had a crowd riot. It’s probably the biggest feature that didn’t make it in. In talking with Nintendo, the idea was that Strikers is not your typical soccer or football game and there are literally thousands of people from the Mushroom Kingdom that come for this game that have to be held back by an electrical fence. The idea was that at some point if a bomb swayed off and hit a generator or whatever, it would compromise the electrical fence and it would come down and people would rush onto the field to just cause even more chaos. If you can imagine that in the finished version you’d think, "how can that possibly make the game more manageable?" We tried to treat it as a power-up; we had a big lofty presentation for it; it was just one of those features that didn’t take shape – it was always a handful. If you bring up the words “crowd riots” to the people on the team it would be interesting to see their facial expressions – everybody has a different reaction. Some wanted to get it in there, others loathed the crowd riot and never want to see it resurrected.

That feature would be good for a hockey game. Is there anything else you want to say about Charged? Are you happy with the end product?

MI and KY: Oh yeah.

You’re happy with the reviews?

MI: It’s always hard when you have something that’s reviewed by the media. You’re going to have people that loved it, you’re going to have the Wii itself given an unfair rep by certain publications because they just don’t believe it’s next gen. But for what we set out to do and seeing how many fans actually like the game, seeing each week tens of thousands of Miis in the seasons online, I think we’ve shipped what we wanted to do. I was in Future Shop yesterday after work and saw a kid buying it with his parents and he looked excited, and you remember your days as a kid – I still have those moments going to buy games – but I think when people have fun with a product that’s a more important thing at the end of the day.

Whether we get an 8 out of 10, 9 out of 10 or whatever online, that’s all subjective. We’re happy with it, Nintendo’s happy with it and it’s doing well in sales. I think we hit what we wanted to do.

It’s funny too that when you’re working with Nintendo, they’ve said in conversations that they don’t even reviews because to them, they had a goal and if they accomplish that goal then that’s what matters. Any time they’ve accomplished that they’ve had great success, with a quality game.

You always look at those review scores as a double-edged sword. When you do well, you feel positive about it, but you can get an 8 out of 10 and it can be one of the worst reviews in the world and it just got 8 out of 10 because of the way that place works.

KY: For me, when I’m looking at the reviews, I look more at the comments, rather than the scores, to see if it makes sense. Did you actually play this thing? I’ve seen a few reviews where they’ve made comments that make me say, “Wow, you’ve never played the game based on your comments.

Ten minutes past the menu and that’s it.

KY: That’s it exactly. So, for me it’s just about the comments. For Charged, it answered all the faults that were identified in the first game, so comments like, “Yeah, this is like the first one should have been.” Yeah, that what is was really.

I definitely had that feeling when I went back and played Super Mario Strikers, just for comparison’s sake. It’s hard to go back to that. Up until Charged, Strikers was in regular rotation at my house because I could play it with my kids, play with friends that come over, but now that’s there’s Charged out… I don’t think that degrades anything the original did, it’s just hard to go back to.

KY: It is.

(September 10, 2007)

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