A portion of a Nintendo Life interview with dev Greg Wohlwend...
NL: TumbleSeed as a concept existed before the Switch was revealed. How have you adapted the game to play to the unique strengths of Nintendo's console?
GW: It did, but we've been working with Nintendo since June and thinking about putting TumbleSeed on the Switch even earlier than that. TumbleSeed has always felt at home with Nintendo in general. We've gone to great pains to make our super-weird nothing-like-it (which is sometimes a bad thing because people get confused) game easy to learn and also great pains making it challenging the 1000th time you try to scale the mountain. I still find our game fun and I've been playing it for years now. That hearkens back to earlier Nintendo days of the very hard games that I grew up with beating my head against. But that only speaks to the audience and Nintendo community, as for the console hardware itself we are working hard on making our game feel amazing with HD Rumble as well as a feature or two that we don't want to talk publicly about because it hasn't gone through enough testing yet, but making TumbleSeed special on Switch is a top priority of ours.
NL: How easy has it been porting the work you've already done to the Switch?
GW: For the most part, surprisingly painless from where I'm standing. Though we have this secret weapon called David Laskey who makes it look easy. He's incredible. Also, we couldn't have done it nearly as quickly without all the hard work from the folks at Unity and those over at Nintendo for working together to make that happen.
NL: You've mentioned that TumbleSeed could be seen as the "lead" title for showing off the potential of HD Rumble on the Switch. Can you explain how you'll achieve this?
GW: In TumbleSeed you're always rolling and that's pretty unique. "Roller" isn't a genre... yet. So because you're always rolling around, changing speed and direction we wanted to translate that directly to HD Rumble and give you an extra sense through the high fidelity vibration. It actually helps people sense where they are and what they're doing in the game in a level of detail that's meaningful far beyond "explosion" and "bigger explosion". I'm no writer, so it's hard to put down in words but you'll just have to feel it for yourself.
NL: Could we see exclusive content on the Switch version of TumbleSeed that isn't available on the other editions?
GW: It's possible. I know that's annoying but we'll have to keep it there for now.
NL: Now you've had the chance to work on the Switch, do you have any ideas floating around for exclusive projects which could push the console's feature-set fully?
GW: Yes, definitely, but we gotta finish this game before we start the next one!
from GoNintendo
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