- 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 kept coming up with additional ideas over the years before it was finally finished
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream lead programmer Takaomi Ueno has said that one of the most challenging aspects of development was Mii interactions, and that it took about “six or seven years” to get right.
In a new Nintendo Ask the Developer interview with the Living the Dream creators, Ueno explained that designing the way Mii characters interact with the game’s features was “no easy feat for the programmers” and took years to fine-tune.
This included features in the user-generated content (UGC) system, player-created items, item interactions, dialogue, and more.
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“Mii characters would sometimes go up and down in the same area, or several of them would try to use the same item at once… So we set rules for each of these unintended behaviors, keeping the ones we thought were weird but amusing,” Ueno said.
“After layering all those elements so they didn’t fall apart no matter how they were combined, everything finally clicked into place and made sense. Before we had those rules in place, it was pure chaos and really hard to control.”
The lead programmer even admitted that there was a time when the team “thought it might actually be fun to let it be chaotic (laughs).”
Art director Daisuke Kageyama added that the team kept experimenting “when it was pure chaos” without actually finding the “right solution” because it kept asking what players would enjoy seeing.
“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 just by observing 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 also this one,'” before Takahashi revealed that the team “ended up spending six or seven years on it (laughs).”
The executive explained that the team conducted playtests after the system was finally at a point they were happy with, and the feedback was “overwhelmingly positive, which was a huge relief.”
“Since we’d been struggling with it for so long, it was really reassuring to hear that people had found it fun,” added Kageyama.
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is now available to play on Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.
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