Walking west on Chicago’s newly fashionable Randolph Street, just across the Chicago River from the Loop, the landscape began to change. About five blocks back I had passed Stephanie Izard’s Girl and the Goat restaurant, but with the last Starbucks in sight rapidly fading behind me, there were only old, unmarked warehouses as far as the eye could see. I came upon a conspicuously dressed security agent on the north side of the street and checked the address above the door. The nearby gentleman with a Triforce tattoo proudly displayed on his bicep gave me confidence that I was in the right place for Nintendo’s stealthy, pop-up preview of the Wii U for gamers on the third coast.

About 150 Club Nintendo members had received a golden ticket for each night of this four-day junket, but I was more interested in talking to the invited students from DePaul University’s Game Dev program. These were undergraduates and graduate students who had made the decision to come to a four-year, liberal arts school to study up on how to make modern games. They weren’t just here to see if the Wii U’s unique touchscreen tablet controller made it a system worth buying. They were also evaluating potential career paths, sizing up the development potential of what will be the first of the several systems that could shape the opening decade of their young careers.

This wasn’t just a regular demo session for them. It was Nintendo’s chance to sell a set of up-and-coming developers on its vision for the hardware. The students' reaction was a mix of giddy optimism about the system's potential and cynical skepticism about certain aspects of Wii U development.

Speaking beside one of the many demo stations showing off games like New Super Mario Bros. U, ZombiiU, Project P-100, and Pikmin, DePaul student Trent Scheffert sounded a bit like he’d been reading from the marketing materials on the Nintendo website. “Gaming as we know it is taking a hard turn away from console games and toward mobile, Web, and other areas where it’s generally more accessible to a wider audience,” he said. “The Wii U is going to bridge that gap just like the Wii did, and it’s going to be great.”

Many others shared his sense of elation. DeVry programming student Matt (no last name given), who got a ticket through Club Nintendo, was practically breathless in listing his favorite features of the system: “Being able to play my favorite games on it, my favorite franchises in HD. Five people being able to play, four Wiimotes plus a gamepad; before you could only have four.”

DePaul graduate student Billy Basso chimed in with more evidence of Nintendo’s brand power. “The game... I’m most excited for is probably Pikmin 3. Not necessarily because it does a good job showing off the Wii U hardware, but more because I just really like Pikmin.”

Access concerns

But were these students as interested in developing for the Wii U as they were in playing it?

Even after seeing the Wii U up close, Basso said he’d still probably list the PC, and Steam specifically, as his preferred development platform. “Everything I’ve heard about Steam from other developers has been overwhelmingly positive,” he said. “The iOS and Android stores also look good and seem pretty straightforward, but getting app visibility is a problem.”

Even among console options, Basso didn’t see Nintendo’s new console as a very realistic option for a new independent developer like him. “If I wanted to develop a console game, I’d probably target the PS3 first. I’ve heard Sony is very easy to deal with. If I didn’t care about sales and the game wasn’t that ambitious, I’d probably just make it in XNA [for the Xbox 360’s Indie Games channel].

“As far as developing for Nintendo consoles goes... I know they’re much more selective about who they sell development kits to,” he continued. “You basically need to have an office, a proven track record already developing games... So at this stage, I’m not putting much thought toward Nintendo development. Maybe in a couple of years.”

DePaul senior Joe Stramaglia also lamented Nintendo’s lack of outreach to the education community. “Unfortunately, while one can certainly learn the programming knowledge of a language to be able to work with Nintendo systems, the actual software development kits and hardware are unavailable to us at DePaul—as well as most schools I imagine—due to a plethora of reasons, though primarily because of the secrecy that the game development community has."

“We have no access to any sort of development kits,” he continued. “The closest thing we do... is we interface with the Xbox 360 using tools that the independent game community uses with XNA. The best way to be prepared for developing on other consoles is to have a wide toolset of working knowledge of programming languages and methods and to be ready to learn on the job.”

Asymmetric musings

These kinds of access concerns overwhelmed the eureka moments I was expecting to hear from these young creatives, the "light bulb" inspirations for interesting ways that the system’s controller could unlock new game designs. Some students I talked to hinted at such thoughts, but none were willing to come out and share their best ideas (which is perhaps to be expected, intellectual property being what it is).

The biggest general design idea inspired by the Wii U was a single, repeated note that is also a focal point of Nintendo’s marketing for the system so far: asymmetric gameplay. The ability to use the tablet controller to receive exclusive information over nearby players holding Wii remotes, and to use the touchscreen for different control schemes from your opponents, was a major focus of the students’ design brainstorming.

But most of the students acknowledged that this kind of asymmetry is not in and of itself a new mechanic; certainly not new in the way that motion control was in the past. That helped contribute to the overwhelming feeling, among the students I interviewed, that the Wii U was going to be a good enough system, but nowhere near the influential paradigm shift the Wii was.

Suffice it to say that Nintendo wasn’t making any of their university guests feel particularly warm and fuzzy about the burgeoning development community for its new system. These feelings may change if and when development access starts to filter down to the student community, and if and when truly revolutionary uses for the Wii U tablet start to appear. But first impressions are important, and based on this short demo session, Nintendo has some work to do to win not just the affection of young developers, but their toil as well.