Despite being nearly completed, the WiiWare version of indie adventure title Machinarium will not see a release. Amanita Design founder Jakub Dvorský tells GameSetWatch they "decided not to release it because it's just not good."
"The resolution is crap, and we had to squeeze the whole game (which is around 360 MB in [the] original version) into [the] 40 MB WiiWare limit. The music sounds terrible, the background pictures are heavily compressed, and we had to throw out ... some animations."
Dropping the project this late? That's some dedication to quality. There is, however, next year's PlayStation 3 port of Machinarium, which Dvorský believes to be the "ultimate version."
Amanita Shelves Machinarium's Nearly Complete Wii Port [GameSetWatch]
PlayStation 3 Machinarium "the ultimate version" [Eurogamer]
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Contest:
11:00 PM on 11.02.2011 | 
Just saying.
I'd rather them maintain their game's integrity than shit out awful versions like Telltale does.
Also, those WiiWare limits are retarded. The same thing happened to SuperMeatBoy, it's too big, that's why it never appeared on the Wii.
That makes no sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcbjyKx_Srg&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Animations man. Animations.
At least i'm pretty sure that's it. In my very small experience animations are the ones that take up space. Polygons don't amount to much, and textures aren't really massive either. Machinarium is hand drawn and has a lot of animations.
Still that game is impressive with the constraints.
Wiiware has some great games but its a shame that it has lost Super Meat Boy, Night Sky, and now Machinarium. Hopefully, Retro City Rampage and La Mulana will still be coming out even though it seems like they've been in development for ages.
With Super Meat Boy, Team Meat were designing a WiiWare game, but then chose to ignore the WiiWare size limits. (This is similar to Backbone's Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix, where they didn't bother to estimate how big the final game would be, panicked mid-development when they started trying to find ways to cut back, and ultimately (successfully) relied on Microsoft raising the XBLA size limits.)
With Machinarium, XGen Studios were tasked with trying to port an Amanita Design PC game to WiiWare.
thats... more than a little sad.
Anyway the game looks so adorable
False, Team Meat was working to have the game on multiple platforms. Sony refused first, then contract obligations with MS prevented a future release. Nintendo just simply announced the game to be on their wiiware service first, never that it was for Wiiware first. Common misconception that it started as a wiiware game.
I don't understand how Super Meat Boy needed so much space...
Frankly, I think Nintendo may have given developers too much credit (as usual) with a number like 40 MB, they clearly can't handle it.
They may as well just raise the limit, they've already given people the tools (SD card support and internal memory) to be able to download games. I don't see why Nintendo should bother trying to manage people who can't and don't appreciate being managed.
I still need to play my PC version of Machinarium...
....so the problem is everyone else, not the file limit....You do realize that's utterly ridiculous right? And that games are made differently than they were on the N64?
The resolution is pretty low on 3ds. Also dual screens?
What part of "they may as well just raise the limit" don't you understand?
The problem comes from multiple angles. Nintendo misjudgement of what small developers are capable of is one of them. The other being developers who don't do the research and waste time before they realise they can't port a game.
No my problem is that you speak like this is some failure from third parties. Like they just failed to meet expectations and they are just not good enough, bullshit. Nintendo enacted the limit in the first place but it's third parties with the problem?
@Brainwasher
Who are you talking about?
It's an understandable decision, but people act like they are personally insulted. That's stupid and childish. Amanita Design said nothing negative about Nintendo. No one needs to jump in and defend Nintendo's honor.
I used to love Nintendo, but seriously, it has so many hyper-defensive fanboys who go bat-shit at the slightest negative connotation that it's really off-putting.
It started with WiiWare in mind.
Machinarium was a completed PC game, where it was then decided to attempt to port it to other systems, and it ran into the limitations of the Wii.
There was a solution, but Nintendo chose not to take. If Nintendo had allowed running games directly from an SD card, then they could have easily have raised the limit. But running code directly from an SD card was seen as either too much of a security risk (for a system that had already been busted wide open and which Nintendo had proven incompetent at re-securing) or too much work. Instead, they went a different route, where "running from an SD card" means the Wii copies the program from SD card to internal memory, then runs the newly installed copy.
"Compared to that, 40MB is huge!(referring to making a 64KB cell phone game 3 years ago). The tough thing is to make trade-offs about what content to include. You need to always be thinking about the game size throughout the development process, and be smart about optimizing and compressing things. So you need careful planning. But if you’re smart about it, and optimize well, you can fit quite a bit into 40MB. Using these techniques, we were able to include many hundreds of hand-crafted custom animations, great-looking 3d graphics, full voice acting, 4 epic soundtracks, and a whole lot more.We really benefited a lot from the experience of making Helix, and learned many tips and tricks about how to cram a ton of content into a 40MB download."
Our hardware background for 3D games is the Nintendo DS. On this system you have to use really every trick available to make a game look good. We developed nine games on the DS and I think that was the perfect education on how to achieve a lot with little resources. All of this experience got into our Wii development.
Shin'en (Jett Rocket/Fast League):
"Our hardware background for 3D games is the Nintendo DS. On this system you have to use really every trick available to make a game look good. We developed nine games on the DS and I think that was the perfect education on how to achieve a lot with little resources. All of this experience got into our Wii development".
"Beside that, on the Wii you have a lot of design choices how to create graphic shaders. You can be very creative by exploiting certain side effects. Also we don't try to go for realism. We just try to make it look as beautiful as possible, while still being believable. Another trick we use is to generate textures in realtime to simulate effects that would otherwise not be possible on the Wii. All in all, it's quite a complicated process to bring all the tricks together but we think it's really worth it."
Over the Top Games (Nyxquest):
"In the end, the size limit works as an advantage for a company like ours. Knowing that you have a limit, makes you constantly aware that the game can’t get out of your hands and you have to focus on the content that fits on those MBs.I hope they increase the limit so we can add more quality content!"
Frontier (Lost Winds):
"There were no problems with the ~40MB file size limit set by Nintendo as the restrictions helped to concentrate the mind. In the past, a mere 22k could be a whole game, yet now most emails are larger than that."
(On Lost Winds 2) "You have to remember we are fitting an environment-based game into a strict file-size limit, which is always a challenge. We are aware of people’s perceptions of the play time of the first game, and have been able to learn a lot from our experience of developing it, and so have been able to cram even more into the space. There are significant optimizations which have really helped us to save space, and therefore add more content, and new and different types of gameplay. I don’t have a hard figure for you, as it depends on the player, but we’re confident that Winter of the Melodias will be significantly longer than the first game for any given player."
Square Enix (My Life As a King):
"It actually wasn't that difficult. I think we designed the game to fit in the memory space. It wasn't so much that we had a game and had to squeeze it down. If anything, I think the size restriction helped us. I don't think we would've had this game design idea if we didn't have the memory restriction to begin with."
"Once we had the restriction, we had... all our artists are veterans, so if you tell them the size, they'll hit it right on. And once we started making it, in the beginning, a lot of people didn't think we could fit this game in the given size, but we were actually quite a bit under. It uses a little bit of compression, and a little bit of techniques. You can fit a lot of game in a small size."
Gaijin Games: (On Bit. Trip Beat )"The size of the game is within the limits of the WiiWare size requirements, and being a rhythm/music game, we wanted to make sure that the music was of the highest quality possible. The audio is by far the bulk of the memory."
And the best.
They didn't say they couldn't do it, it was almost done. They said it's state didn't meet their standards of quality.
@Hiltz
Point?
HAHAHAHA...
You are too funny.
Look at the Wii third party support as a whole dude, if that doesn't tell you that third parties are mostly inept on Nintendo consoles compared to Nintendo, I don't know what will.
Try harder.
@Hiltz
Exactly, the smart developers that came into the development process with the limitations in mind didn't have a problem with it.
Trying to squeeze a 300 MB game that likely isn't optimized at all into 40 MB is like trying to run Crysis on the 360, it can run but not as it was originally intended because it wasn't designed for it.
No it wasn't. Again, Nintendo just simply announced it being available to their platform first. Similar to how MS announced GTA4 being on 360 at an E3 several years back, but it too was going to be available for PS3 and PC. Team Meat already mentioned their development plans and hell they went through and how Nintendo jumped the gun.
@trsspidey
It isn't about talent to compress things. Machinarium uses a ton of audio, and audio is one of those things you can't compress well unless you want low quality enough to not discern it or have it as MIDI...
They already said they don't feel like sacrificing the quality of their work by cutting content and downsampling everything in their game just to make it fit.
You see the header image for this topic? You can only fit 400 of those into that small limit unless you downsample it to get grain and artifacts to reduce file size. You try squeezing that image enough so it eats up nearly a 10th of the current space it takes up and see if that looks good after.