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Nintendo is peeling back the lid on its WiiWare endeavors... slowly. Details on the company's download service for original titles remain nebulous at best. We have a launch date -- May 12 in the United States -- and a handful of announced titles, but Nintendo is reluctant to divulge specifics. Price? Memory size? Release schedules? All very hush-hush.

Perhaps not surprisingly, we've gotten a better sense of WiiWare's shape and specifics from those working with the system. Square Enix is easily the biggest name currently developing WiiWare; their Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King brings both the expertise of Japan's biggest role-playing game developer and the name of the world's biggest RPG franchise to bear on the download service. My Life as a King Producer Toshiro Tsuchida (whose other work includes battle design for the upcoming Final Fantasy XIII) and Programmer Fumiaki Shiraishi (whose resume includes server programmer for Final Fantasy XI and the Japan-only Front Mission Online) were pleasantly candid in their discussion of how developing for WiiWare has forced them to work outside of Square Enix's normal development process.

"With Final Fantasy VII, we established a process for developing high-quality games," Tsuchida said. "All our games since then have been developed with similar a process." In creating a game for WiiWare -- a product designed with a $5 to $10 price point in mind -- a different approach was obviously necessary. This was somewhat complicated by the fact that production on the game began in summer 2006, well before Nintendo had released the official specs for WiiWare; much of the initial planning was founded upon guesswork. Particularly the part about releasing the game in summer 2007.

Nintendo's delay of the WiiWare launch until 2008 gave Tsuchida's team more time to polish up their creation, a simulation game set in the Crystal Chronicles world. Notably, this isn't the same Crystal Chronicles that Square originally announced for Wii, The Ring Bearers; nothing has been seen of that since E3 2006. My Life as a King is something completely different, an adventure that places gamers in the role of a young ruler determined to build a kingdom. Set entirely within the walls of the royal city, the game sees the titular king hiring various adventurers to strike out and complete various quests to help establish the town.

It's not an entirely alien premise to Square Enix; the Super NES classic ActRaiser contained a number of world-building elements, and the overall vibe the game gives off is remarkably similar to Level-5's Dark Cloud games. My Life as a King, however, completely strips away the action elements to focus entirely on simulation -- something that the development team struggled to come to terms with. In fact, the team spent half a year working through several iterations of the game's battle system before ultimately scrapping it. The drive to put combat in the game was essentially reflexive, given the bulk of Square Enix's catalog.

Likewise, the team was forced not to rely on its usual crutches. "We are good at creating content with a high amount of [prerendered] CG," said Tsuchida. "But WiiWare requires a small memory footprint, meaning we couldn't use CG as a weapon. We have to maintain a low cost in an environment where Virtual Console is our primary competition." This attitude changed over time, however; eventually, the team decided that My Life as a King's primary competition was, in fact, other Wii software rather than retro VC downloads. According to Nintendo, WiiWare is created using the same development environment as the system's standard retail software, meaning that the only significant difference between WiiWare and a full-priced title is file size.

The challenge, Tsuchida said, came from the fact that these memory constraints forced the team to abandon the company's standard development process while maintaining its trademark visual polish. To that end, the team relied heavily on scripting and middleware libraries rather than using lower-level programming languages; this saved time and allowed team members to perform double duty at the expense of processing power and precision.

The team began as a group of eight and ultimately ballooned to 18 at its peak -- more than they had hoped, but still a meager fraction compared to the core team of 40 and peak group of up to 400 that work on a game like Final Fantasy XIII. Even so, the team found itself making frequent compromises, sometimes to fit within the limits of time, other times to fit within memory constraints.

Many of the complications Tsuchida and Shiraishi detailed are emblematic of the problems facing the gaming industry at large, the divide between big-budget productions that run the risk of feeling recycled and smaller, independent titles that sacrifice technical prowess for innovation. Clearly, Square Enix's big-budget-oriented process had trouble reshaping itself to match the minimal process that suits something like WiiWare; Tsuchida noted that one of the greatest boons to My Life as a King's development was the team being granted permission by Crystal Chronicles Producer Akitoshi Kawazu to recycle a fair number of assets from the original GameCube title, a luxury smaller developers won't enjoy. Meanwhile, Shiraishi lamented the small budget and staff restricted them from doing something totally new. In all fairness, My Life as a King actually does look rather unique, a take on the RPG genre that reverses the player's role. But clearly the company is entrenched in a specific method, and the WiiWare team had trouble divorcing itself from the habits and expectations associated with the "Square Enix way."

As Shiraishi said: "We didn't aim to create a 'Square Enix' title, but in the end it definitely is a Square Enix game."

The tension between providing triple-A games built on blockbuster budgets and the need to compete with facile indie projects like those on display at GDC's Independent Games Festival Pavilion is one that more developers will be facing as advancing technological standards push the bar for gaming's high end into ever more expensive territory. It's encouraging to see a big name like Square Enix at the vanguard of low-cost console-based content delivery services like WiiWare. Clearly the creation of My Life as a King hasn't been without its problems, and the verdict is still out on whether the team managed to create something as fun as it is different. But the company's first WiiWare outing is definitely a step in the right direction, and the prospect of a corporate powerhouse breaking ranks and focusing again on smaller, more creator-driven projects should be exciting to any gamer.

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