The model even had a slot in which to insert pieces of paper, enabling the designers to change the display.
The prototype was built by Kazuyuki Motoyama, a Hatena designer who worked on the Miiverse UI."We wouldn't know how it felt unless we could actually hold it, but since we didn't have one, the only thing to do was make one," Motoyama explained. "In the middle of the night, I cut pieces of cardboard and glued them together."
"It even has the grips in the back," added Hatena director Yoshiomi Kurisu.
"Motoyama-san burnt the midnight oil to make this."
What do you guys think of this prototype? And if you can't wait for the Wii U to come. Would you make one?
Here is some of the things mentioned on the new Iwata Asks - Wii U: Miiverse: Developers
- Yuzawa worked on system design related to the server, while also coordinating with Hatena
- Kato worked on the libraries for Wii U to communicate between Miiverse and games running
- he did this work alongside a company named Denyusha
- Motoyama from Hatena worked on UI design
- Hatena was very interested in the Miiverse idea right from the start
- connect to games and post screenshots
- even the Wii U browser was still in development when the Miiverse creation started
- Yuzawa and Mizuki came up with the basic idea for Miiverse during meetings
- the team worked on a mock-up to see how the idea would look on Wii U
- the mockup above wasn't to scale with the final version of the GamePad
- a specific team worked on customizing the browser for Miiverse
- making seamless parental control was very important to Nintendo
- the ability to do hand-written posts was added in the middle of development
- the idea came from Mizuki
- the experience from working on Flipnote helped in developing this aspect
- the team was overjoyed when seeing the Miiverse running for the first time
- that joy carried over to the first time the team got to see posts with their own Miis
- the empathy idea discussed in the earlier Iwata Asks steamed from Hatena as well
- development took a lot of figuring things out as they came along
- the number of people working on the project was overwhelming for Kato
- the initial implementation of Miiverse took too long to start up
- this depressed the devs, but they went back to work to revise the speed
- the credit goes to mostly Sotoike and Denyusha
- even the inclusion of touch buttons were hotly debated
- the team had to ask themselves if people would really find each feature useful before they included it
- the Mario Club were testing Miiverse implementation while also testing NSMBU
- a chat room was made in the dev environment in order to get immediate responses
- the team would 'camp it out' when they got into troublesome areas, which would lead to many devs cramming into a room for a day to figure things out
- Miiverse will eventually be accessible via PC and smartphone
- the team says there's a lot to enjoy for those who aren't actually playing Wii U
- the team hopes Miiverse becomes something akin to a 'cloud game diary'
- press the home button and then head right to the Miiverse
- the game screen that was displayed at that time can be saved as a screenshot and get posted
- spoiler button allows people to hide details that might be considered spoiler info
Edited by Cerberuz, 07 November 2012 - 09:44 PM.
