The following info and comments come from Creative Director Jeremiah Slaczka...

"We were actually, I think, the first North American developers to see the Wii U. We're very close to Nintendo and we've done very well on their platform, so they came by and showed us a prototype of the Wii U and said 'What do you think about it?'"

- the team was originally trying to make a pointer-friendly keyboard for a Wii Scribblenauts a year prior
- the idea was scrapped when 5th Cell was shown the Wii U
- 5th Cell got multiple Wii U dev kits throughout the process, with hardware changing all the time
- sometimes the dev kits only had their project running at 10FPS, but eventually they got up to 60FPS as dev kits advanced
- the idea to include Nintendo characters was pitched to Nintendo back at last E3
- Miyamoto even discussed the idea, offering up ideas of how the characters should appear
- the team originally wanted Donkey Kong, Metroid and Pokemon as well, but there just wasn't time to do it

"Our programmers have talked about, from DS to 3DS [to Wii U], it's definitely gotten better. Nintendo has continually focused their SDK to be more user intuitive. A lot less proprietary stuff, a lot more stuff that everybody knows already. So it's not relearning stuff. Of Nintendo stuff, I would say it's definitely the best they've done, I've heard from programmers."

- 5th Cell sees Nintendo realizing that online is very important this time around

"I definitely saw a policy change. They're definitely much more interested in, uh, not the friends codes, not [being] as friends code-heavy anymore. They kind of realized and understand online is very very important for a console."

- 5th Cell didn't have time to include Miiverse-specific implementation, but wanted to
- versus multiplayer was created/tested, but the team didn't end up liking it