MixedBag, the developer who’s in charge of Forma.8 and its release on Wii U at the end of the month, shares their view on bringing future projects over to the Nintendo Switch in an interview with Nintendo Life. They also explain in detail about how their games’ expansive development panned out over the last few years and why they use the term ‘MetroidVania’ when describing the art style for the title.

Below is a couple of excerpts from the interview:

You’ve still brought the game to Wii U, which bucks the recent trend of projects migrating over to Switch and dropping the current system. What was the core motivation for seeing through the Wii U eShop release, and do you also hope to bring forma.8 to Switch in future? We’ve promised a Wii U version of the game and there were no chances we wouldn’t deliver on that. Especially considering that we had the Wii U version up and running perfectly from 2015. We can’t wait to work on Switch and we really hope to be able to port forma.8 and all our future projects on it. It’s such a lovely bit of kit! You describe it as a ‘Metroidvania’; though the term is very familiar, can you explain how that style is applied to forma.8? I know that right now if you say ‘Metroidvania’ you tend to think about a specific kind of game, with specific conventions: a 2D platformer with upgrades and exploration. I tend to not be so rigid and I think forma.8 is a peculiar take on the genre: yes the game is heavily focused on exploration and yes you get different power ups that let you further advance in the world. But at the same time it’s not a traditional platformer, since the main character can fly from the beginning, changing the gameplay a lot. Also, while there’s combat and action in forma.8, I think we’ve put a bit more focus on puzzles: it’s up to the player to come up to different solutions on how to progress in the game. For example: all in-game bosses require some sort of lateral thinking. There’s no ‘shoot until it dies’…

You can read the full interview with MixedBag right here.

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