Retroid Interactive discusses absent Miiverse integration and future features for PictoParty

If you want more out of 'Sketch' from Game & Wario, PictoParty has you covered. The game, developed by Retroid Interactive and released last week on the Wii U eShop, brings such features as coloured pencils to what is a familiar drawing game. GameZone spoke with Niklas Istenes, CEO of Retroid Interactive, who acknowledged that the team knew what they were getting into with Game & Wario as their direct competition on the platform. "What it lacked," he shared, "[was] the feature to add your own words. With PictoParty, you can create your own dictionary and add your own themes. You can also play in teams, use colors and set up the game timers."

Miiverse integration would be ideal for a game like this, extending the game's life through shared ideas and memories. Game & Wario allows for this but removes player photos automatically as a privacy measure. Surprisingly, PictoParty's Miiverse community does not allow screenshots to be attached to posts. The reason for this was detailed by Istenes: "At first, we wanted Miiverse integration to be able to share your creations and dictionaries," he said. "But due to short development time and the possibility to upload profane images, we ditched the feature."

The game's development may be done with, but that doesn't mean updates are out of the question. Their first priority: going multilingual. "There will come a language update that will add the following languages: German, Italian, Spanish, French and Swedish." Istenes added that the team has other features in mind for the future, including "the possibility to share a dictionary and more game modes." However, much depends on the popularity PictoParty can generate.

At present, PictoParty costs $7.99 US ($9.99 CDN), which some may find as a tad high for a game of this nature. Other multiplayer games on the Wii U eShop, like GetClose, have had reductions (permanent in some cases) to hover at more affordable price points. Yet, Istenes shared that their reasoning behind PictoParty's price is to give the perception of quality. "You can't compare it to smart phone games as the development cost is much higher on consoles (age rating costs, development kits, licenses)," Istenes said. "This does not mean that all smartphone games cost less to develop or that they have less quality over console games. We chose the price to make a statement that this is a small game, but will give you great gameplay if you like this kind of game."

A little-known fact about PictoParty is that it was developed using HTML5, which Istenes described as both a "challenge and benefit." He went on to say: "We had some performance issues as it wasn't developed in Unity or C++, but where we lacked performance we had agility. We could easily develop the game on a standard web browser such as Chrome of Firefox using tools meant for web applications, which means that the development of the game was fairly quick."

Following this experience, the team at Retroid Interactive is interested in doing more on Wii U, with the prospect of asymmetrical gameplay offering the most appeal from a development standpoint. The console could use more downloadable party games, so hopefully PictoParty's performance will be enough that they can continue offering this style of accessible entertainment to Wii U owners.