Isabelle from the Animal Crossing series
In a recent interview with US Gamer, Aya Kyogoku, lead developer behind both Animal Crossing spin-offs called Happy Home Designer (3DS) and Amiibo Festival (Wii U) admited that both games are designed around amiibos.
USG: Was the original concept behind Amiibo Festival to create an Animal Crossing Game that involved Amiibos? Or did the idea come along first and then the Amiibo integration was something that added in later in the Development Cycle?
AK: Initially when the Amiibo was announced, there was nothing really said about Animal Crossing Amiibos or any plans for that matter. But as the Animal Crossing team, we were confident that if there was one, it would be really cute... honestly, we just wanted Animal Crossing Amiibo. We wanted the company to make Animal Crossing Amiibo, so that's why we made a game that works with them.
USG: So the decision on which characters to turn into Amiibo is decided without your input? It's not something where the dev teams can go to someone and ask them to develop a character into an Amiibos?
AK: Well, first off, Amiibos aren't just figurines. The most important part is that they link or connect with games. They interact with games. So, it's a necessity to have a figure and a game to go along with it - that's point one.
About Amiibo Festival, this is what we can expect:
USG: All I've seen of Amiibo Festival is what was shown in the E3 stream. Can you elaborate on what exactly the game is? How it plays and how Amiibos factor into it?
AK: Along with the Amiibo Festival Game, we've just announced the Amiibo Animal Crossing figures. This time, you actually control the animals instead of a player character. As you saw in some of the footage, the villages actually turned into a board game, and that is one of the major aspects of this game. It's not just the physical look of the actual board game that makes it a part of the Animal Crossing series - as you may or may not have noticed, one turn in the board game creates one day. The game lets you play one month full of turns.
Things like Sundays, Joan will turn up to sell turnips, and in June, there will be fishing tournaments, so a lot of the familiar events you see in Animal Crossing are synced with how time progresses in the board game. Likewise, you will see changes in the seasons, like leaves will be falling in Autumn, there will be snow in Winter, things like that, to really bring Animal Crossing to life in the board game.
USG: Of course Nintendo already has a board game series, Mario Party, and the most recent version of that had Amiibo integration. How will Amiibo Festival be different from the Mario Party series?
AK: One of the main tenets of Mario Party is that you're playing a board game and in between those board game moves, you play a mini-game and compete, and that's a focus. For Animal Crossing, the focus is actually playing the board game within the village of Animal Crossing, so it's not really focused on the mini games.
If you look at where Joan comes in and you are able to purchase turnips, that's an element that was very prominent in the original Animal Crossing series and that also happens here. So you purchase on Sunday, and you have between Monday's turn and Saturday's turn to sell those turnips to gain money that will help you win the board game. There are a lot of elements that were very popular and significant in Animal Crossing that now act as a very unique characteristic here in the board game. I think that's a major difference between this and Mario Party.
You can see now that these games are designed first and foremost for amiibos, not the other way around. Can see more at the source:
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