Over this week I was talking to Linley Henzell about porting Dungeon Crawl to the Wii. It’s one of those 10 year old undiscovered gems like Subspace. Amazing gameplay, great design, actually more fun than some multi-million dollar RPGs to come out recently. It’s undiscovered because the graphics were originally ASCII based, and are now 2D tile based. If you have work to do, don’t download this game, because you won’t do anything else for the next 3 weeks.
However, I was talking to my prospective partner and we agreed it probably wouldn’t sell well as a 2D turn based game. To be appealing on the Wii, it would have to be 3D real-time with a close-up interface like Fate. The problem is that would require a redesign of major parts of the game, so rather than being a 3 month port, it’s now probably a one year project. It’s really too bad too, because I can see the game being insanely addictive and fun.
On the bright side, I came up with an even better idea for a Wii game. From a business perspective it’s great: trivial development costs, wide demographic appeal, holds its value, and it expands upon an already successful genre. I pitched it to my prospective partner tonight, and if he goes for it I think we can do very well in a very short timeframe.