- The Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream dev team spent "six or seven years" programming the Mii interaction system
- Lead programmer Takaomi Ueno says it was "pure chaos"
- The team kept coming up with additional ideas throughout the years before it was finally complete
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream lead programmer Takaomi Ueno has said one of the most challenging aspects of development was Mii interactions and that it took around "six or seven years" to get right.
In a new Nintendo Ask the Developer interview with the Living the Dream creators, Ueno explained that designing the way Mii characters interact with the game's features was "no easy feat for the programmers," and it took years to fine-tune.
This included features in the user-generated content (UGC) system, things players can create themselves, item interactions, dialogue, and more.
"Mii characters would sometimes pace up and down the same area, or several of them would try to use the same item at once... So, we set rules for each of those unintended behaviors, keeping the ones we thought were odd but amusing," Ueno said.
"After layering all those elements so they wouldn’t fall apart no matter how they were combined, everything finally clicked into place and made sense. Before we had those rules in place, it was pure chaos and really hard to manage."
The lead programmer even admitted that there was a point where the team "thought leaving it chaotic like that might actually be kind of fun (laughs)."
Art director Daisuke Kageyama added that the team kept experimenting "back when it was pure chaos" without actually finding the "right solution" because it kept asking what players would enjoy seeing.
"It feels like we spent the entire project fine-tuning that balance," said game director Ryutaro Takahashi. "(Laughs) It took a long time until the final vision was clear, and we could say, 'Now we just have to build the thing!' We originally planned to finish the UGC tools in about a year and a half. But because we wanted players to enjoy the game simply by observing the Mii characters, we came up with more and more ideas as development progressed."
Programming director Naonori Ohnishi added, "Takahashi-san and the UGC planner kept coming up with ideas like, 'We want this feature...oh, and this one too'," before Takahashi revealed that the team "ended up spending six or seven years on it (laughs)."
The director explained that the team conducted playtests after the system was finally at a point they were happy with, and the feedback was "overwhelmingly positive, which was a big relief."
"Since we'd struggled with it for so long, it was really reassuring to hear that people had found it fun," Kageyama added.
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is now available to play on Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.
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