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StarTopic Nintendo First Party Software Development |ST| Nintendo Party Superstars
- Thread starter astrogamer
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Correction. Fire Emblem Heroes was developed using the Cocos-2DX engine, which Nintendo programmers also used for Miitomo. The second wave of mobile games used Unity (Mario Kart, Super Mario Run, Animal Crossing). Perhaps FE Engage had roots as potentially being a cross-platform mobile game using unity at some point before the hard pullout from Nintendo on 3rd wave mobile games.
SirArthur
Kremling
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The list is of EPD games. Sure IS makes WW, but its EPD led, same thing with Metroid Dread. Also Retro and NLG arent there either. And they also use their own engines.
SoldierDelta
Designated Xenoblade Loremaster
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Fair enough. I just thought there was some odd inclusions, such as NST, that confused me about some of the omissions. Other than that, aight, good list.
boodream
Paratroopa
Monolith, like Next Level Games or Retro Studios, are companies that all existed before they were owned by Nintendo. It's logical and even useful for Nintendo that these companies should retain their know-how and skills - it's an added value. The case of NST is not comparable. NST was founded by Nintendo, and is basically something like EPD America. So if all the EPD teams are working with Module System, it makes sense for NST to do it, but not Monolith.
I understand that the use of standardized game engines is a reaction to the evolution of the industry and the increasing complexity of development. Unity and Unreal Engine save time. We've seen this with Good Feel too. However, in the case of IS, I find it very strange indeed, given how much technological know-how is part of their own history. I'd be similarly surprised if one day a Kirby were developed with Unity, for the same historical reasons concerning HAL.
I read here that this engine change may have been the reason for delays in EPD 8 projects.
EPD certainly is. NST probably just got caught up in that because they've been using EPD tech lately.Nintendo homogenizing engine use?
Bezel seems to specifically built for licensing to external studios. Nintendo doesn't appear to use it internally.
It's likely that ModuleSystem is partially based on BotW's engine. Seems to be a unification of EPD's Switch era tech.
Mer.Saloon
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It's good that Nintendo isn't abandoning their internal engines anytime soon. If the Unity situation taught us something, it's that totally relying on a 3rd party can lead to disaster.
Do you think Mario vs Donkey Kong was made as a smaller scale test for Module and for new devs to be accustomed to the engine? I'd love to see the credits for this game.
Do you think Mario vs Donkey Kong was made as a smaller scale test for Module and for new devs to be accustomed to the engine? I'd love to see the credits for this game.
BlackthornOrion
#theprocessbroke
The idea for it was that it'd make 3rd party development easier, with most confirmed uses coming from Nintendo's partner studios, and occasionally for "not at all related to Nintendo" games (iirc Vroom in the Night Sky uses it)
However, NDcube is a first-party studio and their games have almost exclusively used Bezel lately, so it has gotten some internal use
Hero of Legend
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Nippon Columbia use Bezel as well. Hell even NDCube's common supporter Will Co., Ltd. used it for Cuddly Forest Friends which Aksys localized just last year.
oldpuck
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Seems to be. The name of the engine seems like a giveaway. And it explains why the FSR license was in Switch Sports. It's one of ModuleSystem's upscaling options, which we saw in TearsNintendo homogenizing engine use?
Breath of the Wild uses an engine called KingSystem that was clearly built for Zelda's use. Takuhiro Dohta was the engineering lead on Breath of the Wild. When Tears of the Kingdom came out, he seems to be the technical lead of a new EPD programming division.
Best guess is that Nintendo decided to consolidate around one engine, and picked the Breath of the Wild engine to be the base. That new engine is called ModuleSystem, which sounds suspiciously like "more modular version of the KingSystem engine." With Splatoon 3, ToTK, Wonder all being big games from teams that don't usually share technology at this level, it seems likely that Nintendo is moving toward shared middleware.
Makes sense that you'd work from Breath of the Wild's engine, too. In terms of rendering features, it was maybe the most advanced of the Switch-era. It has an excellent physics engine. It supports really excellent asset streaming for open worlds. And the tooling appears to be quite mature as well.
boodream
Paratroopa
ND Cube uses Bezel, if I'm not mistaken, but my point was that Bezel is no longer needed since the Switch, which supports Unity and Unreal without a hitch. So Nintendo can concentrate on a single engine. The fact that EPD games share the same technology is nothing new. This has always been the case with Mario and Zelda, for example.
Bezel only really exists, at least in its current form, on the Switch. It or some successor to it is likely to continue existing for the foreseeable future. It fills a different niche than the engines used by most of Nintendo's internal studios.
Bezel would still have use for smaller games while not needing to spend on licensing. I can see Bezel getting updates for Drake that aren't mesh shaders, ray tracing and the like. stuff like FSR and DLSS support
boodream
Paratroopa
I think that seeing games like Yoshi Crafted World, Pikmin 4, Fire Emblem Engage or even the recent Mario RPG remake use standard external solutions indicates that this niche doesn't need an internal iteration of Bezel. I'm not even talking about the incomming Mario vs DK because NST is close to EPD Tokyo, but that said, this remake proves that even the "smaller games" don't need differentiated and specific tools anymore. Hence the name ModuleSystem ,I suppose.
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It started as just covering EPD games but people requested I include the other first-party (adjacent in the case of Pac-Man 99, wasn't published by Nintendo anywhere) uses of Bezel, so the criteria for inclusion hasn't ended up 100% consistent but they do exist.
Monolith, Retro and Next Level all seem to be sticking to their own tech for the time being so they'd just be unnecessarily bumping up the misc proprietary category anyway; and if I were covering absolutely everything published by Nintendo, Unity could justify a row of its own by now (BDSP, Engage, Mario RPG, Another Code, etc).
From what I gather it's more a consolidation of both KingSystem and LunchPack into one unified EPD engine; dataminers initially mistook ModuleSystem for a newer itteration of LunchPack when it first appeared in Switch Sports, still some common libraries between them. A lot of easy to imagine benefits in bringing all of their internal tools together, yeah.
The choice of engine has less to do with the "size" of the game and more the studio that's making it. The developers who use Bezel (including Intelligent Systems, who have a bafflingly wide spread of engines in use) have shown no signs of moving away from it. NST has been on EPD tech seemingly since they moved on from dogfooding Nintendo Web Framework, so it's only natural they'd move to the same tools that the rest of EPD appears to be moving to. Games like Yoshi's Crafted World, Pikmin 4, and the Mario RPG remake are from developers who don't entirely stick to the Nintendo ecosystem, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that they might use more generic tools.
The point of Bezel was never to be the sole engine of Nintendo's "smaller" games, it is a product that Nintendo sells to smaller studios who operate entirely within the Switch ecosystem and are in need of a licensed game engine. Having it as an option allows Nintendo to be more self sufficient and not tie their fate to companies like Epic or Unity, neither of which are immune to missteps, as recent history clearly demonstrates. There aren't exactly a ton of studios right now that are in the market for a game engine and are willing to tie themselves so closely to a single platform, but those studios do exist, and Nintendo is better off having an option for them then not.
oldpuck
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This makes sense. I'm curious how high level an engine it is - it seems like Nintendo's engine solution was "bunch of middleware, assemble yourself" for a long time.
I'm not sure. Bezel has some advantages. They're the only ones on the hook for support, and with Unity tanking and WB Games paying "maintain your own engine" costs anyway to keep Unreal 3 alive after Epic moved on, Nintendo might decide that having total control over their legacy library is worth it.
Bezel currently has first class support for both of Nintendo's internal network architectures (NEX and Pia), for the IR camera, and for HD rumble. I don't know what new hardware features Nintendo will put in the Successor, but Mario Party and WarioWare are kind of perfect candidates for "low to mid budget games that don't need extreme performance, but do need to support all the nooks and crannies of Nintendo hardware."
If ModuleSystem is Nintendo's internal answer to Unreal, it would make sense that they need an internal answer to Unity.
Gingerbread Man
Paratroopa
It is possible that KingSystem itself was a fork of a EAD engine they were using internally around the Wii U era, before the consolidation under LunchPack.
Maybe WW HD? We know the Zelda team used the same engine from WW to SS, and their first HD game was WW HD.
Maybe WW HD? We know the Zelda team used the same engine from WW to SS, and their first HD game was WW HD.
Nintendo PTD handles a lot of the technology. They are the developers of things like NintendoWare, Bezel Engine, NPLN, Emu/Porting Technology. I think that EPD internal adapts that PTD technology with some random bits of additional tech into their different respective game engines (ActionLibrary, ModuleSystem, Lunchpack, etc).
Funny how Nintendo developed the Bezel Engine to make Switch development easier for third parties. But it seems that EPD is the one that made the most notable use of it, at least for co-developed/external projects seeing as they lent it to Intelligent Systems, ND Cube, Arika, and indiesZero.
Hero of Legend
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Because most 3rd-parties are scared shitless about the concept of Nintendo-exclusives. Really only Poisoft (Vroom in the Night Sky) and games published by Nippon Columbia use Bezel. Honestly surprised Takara Tomy haven't evidently used it as they've made numerous exclusives.
Man imagine a Switch-exclusive Sonic game built with Bezel. Sigh, to dream.
why limit where you can release?Because most 3rd-parties are scared shitless about the concept of Nintendo-exclusives. Really only Poisoft (Vroom in the Night Sky) and games published by Nippon Columbia use Bezel. Honestly surprised Takara Tomy haven't evidently used it as they've made numerous exclusives.
Man imagine a Switch-exclusive Sonic game built with Bezel. Sigh, to dream.
and what would Sonic on Bezel even amount to? Hedgehog Engine/Frontier Engine is much more featured than any Bezel game shown.
Hero of Legend
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I guess, but outside of Mario & Sonic Tokyo 2020, there hasn't been any real great examples of HE2's potential on Switch. Sega had zero problem with Nintendo-exclusive Sonic games in the past, but now have cold feet about the Switch with its 130 million+ install base, because of course.
what HE2 did on switch isn't as relevant as to what HE2 can do in general. there's no bezel engine game that comes close to Phantasy Star Online 2 or Sonic Frontier.
as for exclusivity, there's zero point to it. the games come to Nintendo and do best there regardless. being exclusive isn't going to make the sales jump by a significant amount
Hero of Legend
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It would absolutely matter as Switch ports of Sonic games have been shoddy if not an absolute embarrassment. Sure is a nice way to treat the audience most loyal to the franchise since it went 3rd-party over 20 years ago.
Plus Nintendo could offer vital marketing and promotion that could elevate the franchise to greater heights. Maybe even finally assist them to make something truly great.
Phosphorescent Skeleton
It's a hard world for little things.
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What about their fans who don't have a Switch, wouldn't they be upset if they couldn't play Sonic? Making the series Nintendo exclusive just doesn't make sense for a lot of reasons.
I'm not sure Unity and Unreal are the best point of comparison. The situation is more that Nintendo works with a variety of internal and external studios that each have their own preferences, many of which have their own in house tech, while Bezel exists to fill in the gaps. The big Unity thing recently may add a bit of pressure to move to not-Unity, but they broadly seem to be willing to meet studios where they are, especially after this past year or so where Unity and Unreal started showing up a lot more in games they contracted out.
The long term support angle is interesting, but I'm not super convinced Nintendo thinks of it that way from how they've acted. They have a tendency to lean on emulation and/or compatibility layers to bridge the gap when returning to older titles.
When Sega starts making games for Nintendo systems first (and give them a budget) like Primce of Persia Lost Crown, then it will improve. Their engine choice has nothing to do with any of this.
And being multiplat doesn't mean Sega can't work out a marketing deal with Nintendo.
Darknut85
#TeamRemake
That‘s the point./s
TheMoon
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one needs only to look at Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown as the perfect example for why exclusivity is entirely irrelevant to making a third party game run and perform well on Switch. It's entirely about focus, planning, and overall making smart decisions about the scope of your project. It always comes down to the "okay we got a game, now we need to figure out how to cram it onto the Switch" afterthought style of project planning. It's sad that Ubisoft is the only company that often ends up able to manage this properly and thus ends up with presumably beneficial partnership deals as well (Starlink, PoP TLC). PoP had a Nintendo co-marketing partnership btw, the whole nine-yards of lead platform support.
Nothing stops Sega from scoping their Sonic games in a way that they don't turn into "embarrassments" on Switch while staying multiplatform.
edit: fixed my brainfart where I said Starlink had the co-marketing deal. I meant PoP, of course, since that's a more notable case (given it isn't obvious by nature of including Nintendo-licensed Star Fox content lol).
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Phosphorescent Skeleton
It's a hard world for little things.
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Like, don't want to call someone a console warrior, but I don't see any other reason to be so obsessed with not only a game, but an entire series being exclusive
Darknut85
#TeamRemake
I don‘t like or want it, but the point of exclusivity is that people who like the series/game can‘t play it on another platform so they buy the platform it is on. Of course third party exclusivity is annoying, and I‘m not a fan of it.
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boodream
Paratroopa
If ModuleSystem can be used both for Tears of the Kingdom and for Mario versus Donkey Kong, then for me it means that it is able to be both unity and Unreal, to use your formulation.
Offering tools such as Nintendoware made a lot of sense to bring in third-party developers at a time when the development environment offered on Nintendo consoles had not yet become much simpler.
But now we have seen that it is almost exclusively Nintendo games that have used Bezel, so we are not necessarily in this external perspective.
Even a small studio like Camelot which is not a division of Nintendo like ND Cube and can therefore be considered as external, chose not to use Bezel, for instance.
I certainly hear the concerns you raise about alternatives, including Unity. However, tout kni better than me that for a small independent developer, using a technology provided by Nintendo means limiting oneself exclusively to the Nintendo market while its primary interest is obviously to be able to offer games on as many platforms as possible.
And I wonder all the more that even internally, we have recently seen games published by Nintendo prefer Unity or Unreal while they had Bezel.
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Nemesis24
Tektite
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thank you for the clarification and thank you for the job, its always useful to use it whenever i need to explain to other people. Also I had no idea another code was done in unity
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Curious about how far along Next Level's next project is, given some recent depatures. The bottom one implies a few things about the sort of game they're working on.
Unrelated to Next Level; Jesse Spears has left Retro after nearly 20 years. Typically i'd avoid mentioning any names to not drive any unwanted attention towards them and their pages, but given how long Jesse has been at Retro, being one of the remaining faces from the original Prime trilogy era working on Prime 4, I think it's worth noting his leave.
At some point after Prime Remastered released he removed two cancelled projects from the above list (and the third mystery project became, well, Prime Remastered); can't imagine Nintendo is a fan of publicly acknowledging unreleased games, though it was probably just his own choice to clean up the list. Wonder what his depature means for how close Prime 4 is to wrapping up.
Unrelated to Next Level; Jesse Spears has left Retro after nearly 20 years. Typically i'd avoid mentioning any names to not drive any unwanted attention towards them and their pages, but given how long Jesse has been at Retro, being one of the remaining faces from the original Prime trilogy era working on Prime 4, I think it's worth noting his leave.
At some point after Prime Remastered released he removed two cancelled projects from the above list (and the third mystery project became, well, Prime Remastered); can't imagine Nintendo is a fan of publicly acknowledging unreleased games, though it was probably just his own choice to clean up the list. Wonder what his depature means for how close Prime 4 is to wrapping up.
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OctoSplattack
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Is it likely that NST is gearing up to do bigger games? It would be cool, but I don't really get the sense right now that they're doing anything beyond small-scale and budget releases in-between assisting on Mario games alongside 1-Up.
Giancarlo
Nintendo connoiseur
well if the next 3D Mario is massive as some rumors sugest, Nintendo might need I-UP and Nintendo Software Tecnology to act as suport/co-developers, kinda like Monolith Soft on the 2 Legend of Zelda for Wii U/Switch(Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom)
boodream
Paratroopa
We'll see who's in charge of Luigi's Mansion 2 HD, but if a project ended in late 2023/early 2024 at NLG, it would make a lot of sense for it to be this game. The timing seems too short for this to be a brand new game, and it might make sense to work on a remaster while preparing the next Luigi's Mansion opus, just as Retro worked on Prime Remaster while preparing Prime 4.Curious about how far along Next Level's next project is, given some recent depatures. The bottom one implies a few things about the sort of game they're working on.
Unrelated to Next Level; Jesse Spears has left Retro after nearly 20 years. Typically i'd avoid mentioning any names to not drive any unwanted attention towards them and their pages, but given how long Jesse has been at Retro, being one of the remaining faces from the original Prime trilogy era working on Prime 4, I think it's worth noting his leave.
At some point after Prime Remastered released he removed two cancelled projects from the above list (and the third mystery project became, well, Prime Remastered); can't imagine Nintendo is a fan of publicly acknowledging unreleased games, though it was probably just his own choice to clean up the list. Wonder what his depature means for how close Prime 4 is to wrapping up.
I'm curious to see how NLG has managed the transition since its takeover, knowing that some very important members have left. Mario Strikers, even though its development had begun before the studio was bought out, seemed to lack a number of things when it was released, and I wonder if its development hasn't been affected by this transition. Allowing new members of the team to familiarize themselves with the series by starting with a remaster may therefore seem logical. But all this is of course pure speculation and I'd find it cool if they'd worked on something else ( even if unfortunately I'm dubious about the rumour that had associated them with F-Zero GX HD, although I would very much like it to be true.)
About Retro, there's a lot to suggest that Prime 4 will be released in 2024 and that development is nearing completion. Beyond that, I wouldn't be surprised if they're already starting the groundwork on Prime 5. In addition to a tester, probably for Prime 4, they're recruiting engineers and concept artists at the moment. They've already recruited an ex-Unity ingeneer a few months ago, so it's cool that there are job opportunities for all the people who have unfortunately been the victims of layoffs in the industry in recent months.
Dark Cloud
Warpstar Knight
Wow Jesse Spears left? This person was the who one listed “working on an experimental game” after DKCTF. They recently took it off their LinkedIn profile like 2 months ago
TheMoon
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1UP Studio is always doing support for them anyhow. That's what they're there for.
OctoSplattack
Chain Chomp
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Well, yeah. Like I said, I don't really foresee NST heading up any projects much larger in scope than, say, Bowser's Fury. They'll continue in their role as a support studio for Mario projects and any future indie collaborations, while also pumping out small-scale, budget titles like F-Zero 99 and Mario vs. DK. There's value in having a studio dedicated to doing games with (relatively) quick turn-around times.
You would almost have to assume that they develop another 99 title. Whether it's taking F-Zero to the next level under the 99 banner (F-Zero X99?) or just adapt another IP like Puzzle League 99. However, I would distinguish that Mario vs DK is a full blown retail title, and is a big step up from the previous eshop only title. It's hard to say whether they will continue doing auxiliary work under the Nintendo EPD teams, or find their niche like a retro and remaster line they develop with more independence.
BOTW was Nintendo EPD / SRD / Monolith (+ art contractors)
TOTK was Nintendo EPD / SRD / Monolith / NERD (+ art contractors)
SMO was Nintendo EPD / 1UP (+ art contractors)
CAPTOAD was Nintendo EPD / 1UP / NST
SM3DWORLD was Nintendo EPD / 1UP / NST
SM3DAC was Nintendo EPD / 1UP / IQUE
IQUE has been mysteriously hiring and I suspect their attachment will be support work for EPD Tokyo. They may become one of the Nintendo Group support devs on 3D Mario going forward (with NST potentially working on other projects).
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BlackthornOrion
#theprocessbroke
With their current trajectory, I could kinda see NST becoming something of a "Next Level lite" in between their 3D Mario support work, or maybe "pre-Luigi's Mansion 3 Next Level" is a better descriptor
Like, I doubt we'll see any big ambitious "expecting to sell 10 million" projects from them, but it feels like smaller/more-focused projects on par with something like a Mario Strikers or Punch-Out Wii are plausibly on the table now; maybe they could pick up Captain Toad and make that series their own, or try circling back to some of the racing stuff they were doing in the early 2000s
Or maybe Mario vs Donkey Kong turns into a surprise hit and they double down on that again but keep it in the DK '94 style rather than putting all the focus on the minis
Like, I doubt we'll see any big ambitious "expecting to sell 10 million" projects from them, but it feels like smaller/more-focused projects on par with something like a Mario Strikers or Punch-Out Wii are plausibly on the table now; maybe they could pick up Captain Toad and make that series their own, or try circling back to some of the racing stuff they were doing in the early 2000s
Or maybe Mario vs Donkey Kong turns into a surprise hit and they double down on that again but keep it in the DK '94 style rather than putting all the focus on the minis
boodream
Paratroopa
I think it would be great if NST could work on a project that wasn't a remake and was their own game. It's a real waste that we haven't made more use of this resource in recent years, especially at a time when the need for development skills and resources has increased dramatically everywhere.
On the other hand, I'm still quite amazed to read so often here that a studio that was responsible for a GBA remake, a port of Captain Toad and F-Zero 99 would have directed, no more and no less, the first open-world 3D Mario experience.
oldpuck
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Bowser's Fury was pretty excellent, and it seems like EPD was mostly in a supervisory role. It would be absolutely wild to give them that, get something that good, original, and well received, then send them back to purely a support role. It's the only mainline Mario experience primarily made outside of Kyoto.
If NST is only useful to Nintendo as a tech oriented support studio, the Bowser's Fury team should pull a Platinum and get out of there.
If NST is only useful to Nintendo as a tech oriented support studio, the Bowser's Fury team should pull a Platinum and get out of there.
boodream
Paratroopa
Either Nintendo is completely insane, or the extent of NST's role is maybe exaggerated.
