PM: There is no conflict here, we want to build a franchise, and are reaching out to various audiences (with the PC game and TV series as well) to make Viva Piñata more successful as a whole.
JH: Yeah, they could certainly see how a DS version could help Viva Piñata reach as broad an audience as possible.
Rare has repeatedly stated that Pocket Paradise will play and feel like the first game on the 360. Can you name some of the advantages -- for players and for devs -- of the DS version over the 360 game?JH: The DS and 360 versions are designed to be played in different places at different times. The DS version is portable, so you can take it anywhere, and tend to your garden on the go. The gameplay is perhaps better suited to short, bite-size chunks. As for us, the developers, I guess we had the advantage of being able to pick the brains of the original team, to find out what the most challenging features were to develop. And of course, we pretty much had a perfect Viva Piñata blueprint already laid out for us to work from!
PM: The touch interface works incredibly well and complements the control methods beautifully. Pocket Paradise is aimed at a different demographic and platform than Viva Piñata on Xbox 360, and so some design decisions were taken that changed the way you do things, or the scope of some things.
How does the game feel when played with the stylus?
JH: Wonderful! You really get the sense that you are directly influencing the items in the garden, whether it's picking up and dragging a slice of carrot cake, tickling a BarkBark under the chin, knocking the flower heads off an Orchid or simply running the tip of the stylus along the surface of a pond. You really have to try it to appreciate how well it works.
We really enjoyed Viva Piñata on the 360, but there's no denying it had one hell of a difficulty curve over the first couple of hours. What measures are you taking to make the game more instantly accessible on the DS?
JH: In Pocket Paradise, there are a set of four very simple tutorials that you play at the beginning of the game, which teach you the basics before you're thrown into the main garden. The first tutorial, which stars Hudson Horstachio, teaches you the basics of navigating the garden and directing piñatas. The second one, with Fergie Fudgehog, instructs you on the basics of gardening and growing plants, the third on shops (Paulie Pretztail) and the fourth on the overhead map and journal (Franklin Fizzlybear). These just take a few minutes, but tell you pretty much everything you need to know.
PM: Eight further optional Episodes appear at key times during your progress through the Main Garden game, and each teaches you a new skill to improve your progress later on. Any Episode can be revisited to remind you how to do something again.
The nixed Xbox 360/DS connectivity sounded like a fun feature. Any plans to include it in a patch for the upcoming Xbox 360 game? We presume Nintendo was fine with allowing the two games to play nice together ...
JH: No, there are no plans to connect the two games.
PM: We were not aware of the Live Vision Camera feature in Trouble in Paradise during the course of development on Pocket Paradise, and so we didn't have plans to include any such feature.
