- THE 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 continued to come up with additional ideas over the years before the project was finally completed.
Tomodachi Life: living the dream Lead programmer Takaomi Ueno said that one of the most difficult aspects of development was the interactions with the Miis and that it took about “six or seven years” to achieve.
In a new Nintendo Ask the Developer interview with the creators of Living the Dream, Ueno explained that designing how the Mii characters interact with the game’s features was “not an easy task for programmers”, and that it took years to refine the game.
This included user-generated content (UGC) system features, items that players can create themselves, item interactions, dialogue, and more.
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“Mii characters would sometimes roam the same area, or several of them would try to use the same item at the same time… So we made rules for each of these unintentional behaviors, keeping the ones we thought were strange but fun,” Ueno said.
“After layering all of these elements so that they didn’t fall apart, no matter how they were combined, it all finally came together and made sense. Before we had these rules in place, it was pure chaos and really difficult to manage.”
The lead programmer even admitted that there was a point where the team “thought that leaving things chaotic like that might actually be kind of fun (laughs).”
Art director Daisuke Kageyama added that the team kept experimenting “back when it was pure chaos” without actually 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 before the final vision was clear, and we could say, ‘Now we just have to build the thing!’ We originally planned to complete 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 found 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 did some playtesting after the system finally got to a point they were happy with, and the feedback was “overwhelmingly positive, which was a big relief.”
“Since we had struggled with this for so long, it was really reassuring to hear 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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