Wunderling will be making its way to the Nintendo Switch this year, so I got in touch with Retroid to talk a bit about its development. Come check it out!
PS4Blog: Hi! Thank you for joining us this morning. Could you please help us get started by telling our readers a bit about yourself and your work?
Thank you for having me! My name is Niklas Istenes, and I’m the Producer and Game Designer of Wunderling. I’m also the CEO of Retroid running the day to day business with both internal projects such as Wunderling and also managing our port projects, which right now consists of Hayfever for PS4 and Xbox and the Switch version Lonely Mountains: Downhill.
PS4B: On that note, Wunderling is on its way to the Nintendo Switch. How would you describe the game to someone who’s never heard about it?
In short, I would say that Wunderling is a low-level goon adventure platform game. It’s a game where you can only (at the beginning) control your jumps, and you need to time it well to be able to navigate treacherous levels and find the exit portal. Your goal is to track down and destroy the hero of the game since you are the henchman of an evil witch.
PS4B: What were some of the games that were used as inspiration for the creation of Wunderling?
It’s a spiritual successor to an older game we made called Cow Dash – the game is sadly not available anymore. Other than that, we were inspired by other auto-runners such as bit trip runner and Wind-up Knight.
PS4B: How long has the team been working on Wunderling? Have there been any particular hurdles or challenges you’ve had to overcome during the development process?
We made a very bold move and started by buying a booth for PAX East 2017 in December 2016, by that time we had nothing, not even a title for the game. So we worked hard before PAX and managed to make a pretty good demo! Being an indie is hard, and we had to solve finances. So we took a good chunk of 2017 off. Calendar-wise we have worked on the game since 2017, but effectively maybe around two years.
Other than finances, we had issues finding the right sweet spot for the difficulty of the game, testing is super important but is also very hard to execute some times.
PS4B: How soon will we be able to play Wunderling on Nintendo Switch?
Very soon! A release date will be announced in the coming days.
PS4B: And that’s all the time we have for today. Is there something else you’d like to add before we end this one?
If you can’t wait to try it, we’ve been selected for PAX East Indie Showcase and will once again return to PAX East, hope to see you there!
