Midnight Status on why Swap Fire is coming to Wii U, release date plans

A portion of an 8-Worlds News interview with developer Midnight Status...

8-Worlds News: The original concept Swap-Fire-02of Swap Fire originated from 7 Day FPS Challenge back in June 2012, what made you decide to carry over that concept to a fully-fledged-out game?

Midnight Status: The first time I realized that it needed to become a full game was during a summer game programming course I was teaching in 2012. I shared the game with the kids and they kept asking if we could play it every day. The whole group seemed to really enjoy the mechanic, which is slightly mind-bending but not so much so that they couldn’t pick it up and just play.

Sometime after that I experimented with a more hardcore crowd by setting up a PC based LAN with Xbox controllers at a midnight opening for Injustice: Gods Among Us at a local GameStop and the store clerks actually had to kick two guys out who were hooked on the game. That was step two.

Finally, I hired Henry Meredith this past summer. He was brought on initially to help with other aspects of the business but was interested in game development so I showed him a port of our mobile game Airspin for Wii U. We played a special 2-player mode I made for that (one player gets a Wiimote and the TV while the other is on the Gamepad). However, we just weren’t having that much fun. So I said, hold on a second, and I set up the Swap Fire LAN demo from the GameStop experiment. We were instantly having more fun and that sealed the deal, I dropped the Airspin port and started working on Swap Fire from scratch for Wii U.

8WN: Are you still aiming for a spring/summer 2016 release? How is development coming along?

MS: Yes, it would be nice if we can be on the eShop by this summer as originally planned. We have the framework of the whole game but it’s still rough. We’re working on adding the secondary and tertiary details that really make a game feel great. It’s kind of daunting getting the opportunity to develop a game for a Nintendo platform. It’s the dream of my generation and I’m pretty terrified I’ll screw it up. We have to time it just perfect. If we rush too much the game will stink and if we toil away for too long we’ll miss the opportunity.