GDC 08: Square Enix Presentation on Crystal Chronicles Wii Ware

In San Francisco, CA today during GDC 2008, Square Enix developers Toshiro Tsuchida and Fumiaki Shirashi hosted a presentation regarding the upcoming Wii Ware title Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King. Below, you’ll find our quick recap of the presentation.

The presentation started off with a quick for Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King for WiiWare.

Tsuchida gave a brief rundown on his history in the game industry. He’s been in the industry for 20 years now.

He talked about Square-Enix’s strengths, which includes the talent to create unique worlds with high quality visuals.

Talking about Wii Ware itself, Tsuchida named a few of the advantages/pros to developing for the downloadable service: games can easily be downloaded to player’s consoles, small memory footprint and relatively low cost of development.

Went over the development process at Square for My Life as a King. Here’s the rundown: Established story, characters and art. Plan battle system, field maps and cut scenes. Ascertain technical restrictions and create workflow. Create benchmark for graphics quality Mass product content using our pipeline.

Next, Fumiaki Shiraishi began speaking. He has worked on titles such as Final Fantasy XI and been with Square Enix for seven years.

He went over his wish list for working on My Life as a King: more say in the game, a chance to try out new technologies, make a game that did not rely on data volume, try a smaller-sized project with a smaller-sized team.

Development began September 2006, a few months after Nintendo announced Wii Ware.

Team did not know much about the system, however, and had to assume a lot of things when first starting to plan the title.

He said that Square knew it could not use the standard Square process in developing this game. He expected it would take seven months to develop the game, but in reality this development length has been twice that.

Square started developing game with the game concept, rather than visual assets.

Because of all the unknowns going into developing for Wii Ware, he expected there might be last minute changes to the game code, so it used light code that was flexible and could be modified further down the road.

The dev team was very small and everyone contributed to the project. Many members of the teams played multiple roles in the development process as well.

Showed a gameplay demonstration of My Life as a King.

These are the things they felt went wrong during the development of the game: the cost of a new game design, and the team spent months designing the battle system but ended up scrapping most of it. The battle system was even rewritten three or four times. The team originally intended to rely on AI for content, but that turned out to be not easy. The team spent the first six months of the game fine tuning the first hour of the game, which was in vain. Square’s team wasn’t sure of the demographic of Wii Ware, and thus the game design suffered because Square was unsure of what target audience to produce this game for (for instance, difficulty balancing was a major issue).

Graphically, the goal started off to make a game that looked better than Virtual Console games, but then the goal became to make a game that looked decent compared to other Wii games.

Said that members had more say in the game itself because of the small team size.

Said the team was able to make the launch date for Wii Ware because it did not wait for Wii Ware to be announced to get started.

Shiriashi then handed the stage back over to Tsuchida, who talked about the main idea in designing My Life as a King. One major problem was having to differentiate Wii Ware games from Virtual Console. Once thing the team planned to do was to completely utilize the Wii’s processing power, but it eventually decided that could result in file sizes that were too large.

He also talked about reducing the cost of developing the game. The team used and augmented an existing franchise (Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles for GameCube), by using assets that were already developed and could be employed in a new game. Square also used young staff with veteran staff supervision, which cost the company less money to operate.

Many assets that were available from Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles were not used or cut, to keep cost and file size down. These include the world outside the castle, battle scenes and villager model variations.

After the presentation, the two game developers did a brief but interesting Q&A. One audience member asked whether or not the Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: Crystal Bearers is still coming to Wii, to which the response was, “You’ll have to wait for a press release about that.”

And that’s about it. We’ll have more on My Life as a King as we hear it.