Slaczka says 5th Cell's relationship with Nintendo shows that the company is making an effort to reach out to western studios and third parties, which have generally struggled to sell games when pitted against Nintendo's own software. With Wii U, Nintendo offers the processing power to support multiplatform ports — but that doesn't guarantee the new console will be easy to develop for.

Every game console has its quirks. Some, like the Sega Saturn and PlayStation 2, were notorious for their complexity. A programmer — whose Reddit post about coding for different game consoles went viral earlier this year — begins his description of the PS2 with this: "You are handed a 10-inch thick stack of manuals written by Japanese hardware engineers. The first time you read the stack, nothing makes any sense at all."

"Once the ball started rolling it only took a couple months. For business standards, it was pretty fast."

While Wii introduced motion controls unlike anything console developers had worked with, the CPU and GPU were essentially souped-up versions of the GameCube's Gekko and Flipper (hence the long-lived "two GameCubes duct-taped together" meme). Wii U is a different story. Nintendo has overhauled its online platform with Nintendo Network, the console runs on a new multi-core processor, and its ability to stream low-latency data to the GamePad represents a change in technology. These are all good things, but it's easy to envision a steep learning curve (and maybe a 10-inch stack of impenetrable manuals) attached to Wii U development.

Thankfully — at least from 5th Cell's perspective — that isn't the case.

"Our programmers have talked about, from DS to 3DS [to Wii U], it's definitely gotten better," says Slaczka. "Nintendo has continually focused their SDK to be more user intuitive. A lot less proprietary stuff, a lot more stuff that everybody knows already. So it's not relearning stuff. Of Nintendo stuff, I would say it's definitely the best they've done, I've heard from programmers."

"[Nintendo was] really open. They did have their own infrastructure, but we couldn't really use it just because [of timing]. Had we had more time to do it, then we absolutely would've been able to work with the Miiverse."

The same holds true for online. "I definitely saw a policy change," Slaczka remarks. "They're definitely much more interested in, uh, not the friends codes, not [being] as friends code-heavy anymore. They kind of realized and understand online is very very important for a console."

Starting with Wii U, Nintendo Network will support Network IDs (using letters!) in place of the universally hated friend codes. The heavily moderated Miiverse will serve as a social network for Wii and 3DS owners, but Nintendo isn't forcing developers to work within the Miiverse framework. Scribblenauts Unlimited allows objects to be shared online, but in order to finish the game on time 5th Cell had to skip out on Miiverse integration.

"[Nintendo was] really open," says Slaczka. "They did have their own infrastructure, but we couldn't really use it just because ... they didn't even have final stuff for a long time, and we were like 'well we gotta be a launch title; we gotta ship.' ... They didn't have any problem with us doing our own thing ... Had we had more time to do it, then we absolutely would've been able to work with the Miiverse."