Notion Games discusses the process of bringing Super Ubie Land to Wii U
A portion of a Pure Nintendo interview with Notion Games' Ben Ward...
PN: When converting Super Ubie Land from HTML5 to C#, do you just go line by line and plug in the assets?
BEN: Due to the nature of Construct — the program we used to make Super Ubie Land — most of the automated features have to be re-coded. For the assets, I can reuse numbers like coordinates or animation speeds, but a lot has to be reworked too. It involves some experimenting to create formulas to convert numbers to a different system and still output the same thing.
PN: Every programmer out there knows that sometimes programming “goes wrong,” and you can spend hours troubleshooting a problem. Since the HTML5 code already exists for SUL, do you find that you run into fewer problems, or is converting the code just as troublesome as writing the code from scratch?
BEN: Porting a game can take less time than making a game from scratch, but there are just as many complications when converting code or writing it from scratch. I would say there are more complications for the Wii U version than the original because the automatic features we relied on for the original game are no longer there. We are also using a more advanced computer program than before, so it naturally takes more work.
PN: When converting Super Ubie Land from HTML5 to C#, do you just go line by line and plug in the assets?
BEN: Due to the nature of Construct — the program we used to make Super Ubie Land — most of the automated features have to be re-coded. For the assets, I can reuse numbers like coordinates or animation speeds, but a lot has to be reworked too. It involves some experimenting to create formulas to convert numbers to a different system and still output the same thing.
PN: Every programmer out there knows that sometimes programming “goes wrong,” and you can spend hours troubleshooting a problem. Since the HTML5 code already exists for SUL, do you find that you run into fewer problems, or is converting the code just as troublesome as writing the code from scratch?
BEN: Porting a game can take less time than making a game from scratch, but there are just as many complications when converting code or writing it from scratch. I would say there are more complications for the Wii U version than the original because the automatic features we relied on for the original game are no longer there. We are also using a more advanced computer program than before, so it naturally takes more work.
