How did the game land exclusively on Wii U?
When we became independent as Valhalla Game Studio, I feel like we were able to pull together a lot of people who really loved games.
We were very fortunate in that regard. But after THQ collapsed, we found ourselves needing a partner. We talked to lots of different people, but the ones who understood what we were challenging ourselves to do, who most supported our vision was Nintendo. Really it was about the people involved working together well.
Thankfully, we’ve been able keep a lot of people who were instrumental in building the game from the beginning together, including former members of THQ, like Mr. Danny Bilson. I think what was most important in putting that team together, was that everyone had the same passion and love for the project.
Devil’s Third is a shooter with melee aspects. How do you balance that? And what are some of the other ways you set yourself apart from other shooters, other than the humor?
First, I’d like to address the reason why we decided to make a shooter. After lots of years of experience working on fighting games in the Dead or Alive series, and action games with the Ninja Gaiden series, we wanted to find a new challenge, and we felt like that challenge, for us, was the new category of shooters.
As far as finding that balance, I think that was an interesting question for us because we haven’t really seen a lot of shooters that are attempting to do these kinds of things that you would find in action games like this. So, the general flow that we followed was, at that stage, we started researching all the modern shooters we could get our hands on. And then we created the basic engine of the game and started adding the melee elements to that.
The main engine of the game is as a shooter, but because we have so much know-how in the area of action games, we’re able to find ways to make those elements come in pretty smoothly, as well. But I hope everyone gets a chance to play the game and judge for themselves.
In terms of finding a way to make those work well together, we had to consider the various situations that people would choose to use gun or melee attacks. So, if you have a far away enemy, you do still have a number of options. You don’t necessarily have to shoot someone just because they are far away. You could be sliding toward them closing the gap while shooting the whole time, or just sliding in so you can start to use melee attacks up close. You can also throw a melee weapon and kill from a distance, or just use melee all the way to the far enemy killing other enemies along the way. What’s important to us is that we could achieve that kind of fusion of various approaches.
