KOHEI TAKASE AND YUSAKU YAMANAKA
IVY THE KIWI is a platform game in which the player doesn’t actually control the character
on screen, but instead guides them to their destination via the DS stylus or Wii remote,
drawing lines and catapults to help protagonist Ivy reach her destination. The game’s
development was very different from the traditional process. Here, we present to you how
Yuji Naka’s studio PROPE Ltd. created this title, as well as how we announced it to the world.
WHAT WENT RIGHT
1} GAME CREATED IN “NE W HIRES” TRAINING SESSION. IVY THE KIWI was created by three newly employed
staff members who had to make a mini-game in one of their training sessions.
At PROPE, every year, when we hire new employees we customarily divide them into teams and have
them create a mini-game as one of their training exercises. The development period is one month and we set
the platform as Wii, but other than that, each team is free to create any type of game they would like.
The planner at the time (who would become the director for IV Y THE KI WI?) had an idea to “create a game
with a soft and squishy creature that you pinch and extend.” On the other hand, the designer‘s idea was to
create “a character that keeps running while the player creates clouds to prevent the character from falling.”
Both staff members felt strongly about their ideas and didn’t want to back down, so when they almost got
into an argument, the programmer said, “What about a game that incorporates the two together?” So he
created a program that formed soft clouds, which later became the vines. It was his way of mediating the
disagreement, but the program became the prototype for IV Y THE KI WI?
GAME DEVELOPER | JANUARY 2011 38
