/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9852016
There's an interview on shmuplations (https://shmuplations.com/alife/)) with Tetsu Katano, Takashi Iizuka, and Yuji Naka where they talk about the A-life stuff. From the way they talk about it, the final result was because of scheduling deadlines, hardware limitations, and the conscious design decision to make the game feel like a unique, personalized object to explore and experiment with as well as having all the systems of the game intersect with each other.
>Naka: Actually, the truth is I wanted to make the A-LIFE sim more meaningfully connected to the game itself, but that would have meant changing the underlying gameplay of NiGHTS. For awhile, I thought we should just make the A-LIFE sim its own game. We talked about it, but eventually settled on the way it is today.
>Katano: We had an overall tight, very limited schedule for NiGHTS, and the A-LIFE part especially took up a lot of that time.
>Iizuka: I’m glad that there’s many different ways to enjoy NiGHTS. I’ll be very happy if players get so into the A-LIFE system that they become experts with the controls and ultimately get an A rank on all the courses.
>Naka: We had originally wanted players to be able to name the individual Pians. If you pressed the pause button, their name would appear and you could change it there. The names would have carried on in some form, like the genes, too, gradually changing with each successive generation... Unfortunately, it would have made the save data too large, and only people with the backup RAM carts would have been able to play. So we cut that idea. And there are other places where I think we could have given them more stats, or done something more interesting with them.
>Q: One of the fun things about the A-Life system is that when something cool happens, it feels like a private discovery, like you’re the only person to witness it.
>Naka: That’s great—that’s very much something we were aiming to create.