A portion of a SlicedGaming interview with David Braben…
Sliced Gaming: Can you explain the origins of LostWinds’ concept? How long was the game in development for and how many people worked on it?
David Braben: We have a forum within Frontier called ‘Game of the Week’ where anyone can put forward game ideas. This causes a great deal of debate, criticism and argument, with many improvements, problems being raised and solved - we have likened the process to dangling a leg of lamb into a piranha-filled stream: the water boils for a while, but then whatever is left must be pretty tough.
The idea for LostWinds dates from the time that the Wii was first announced privately to developers, when we were brainstorming design ideas that made good use of the Wii controls – LostWinds is one of many strong ideas we have built up over time, and it gathered a number of very enthusiastic internal advocates.
Steve Burgess, one of Frontier’s designers, was watching the trees and leaves from the window on a windy day. He remembers thinking about how many ways the wind shapes and manipulates different things within the world, and if only there was some way to become the wind in game. He then applied this train of thought to the Wii controller.
So the game was designed with this in mind, the whole point of the game is to allow the player to use the Wii control system in a coherent, intuitive, satisfying way. Once we actually started development, towards the end of last year, it took between four and five ‘man-years’ of work. But a lot of concept development was done prior to this by the enthusiastic team of advocates of the game.
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Frontier interview
