Few indie studies dare to work during 2 years on a project destined to be exclusive to a platform, in this case Nintendo 3DS, without third party pressures and with just a single goal in mind: quality.
This is the risk that is running studio VD DEV, handheld games specialist with experience in Nintendo consoles (among their past work are COP The Recruit for DS and a Driv3r adaption for GBA) and their new project for 3DS, Iron Fall.
The first image of the title, a sort of third person action game that is reminiscent of series like Gears of War, has surprised the handheld players for it's graphic style and genre, uncommon in the machine.
Only three persons are working on this project: Fernando Velez, the coder, Dubail Guillaume, the designer, and Frederic Zimmer, helping to refine the project and with AAA games experience having worked on WatchDogs at Ubisoft.
Iron Fall is set in the near future after "some trouble comes directly from outer space", said Velez, noting that in the playable field there will be similarities with Gears of War, but they will also be innovating in their own way.
"As for the gameplay, it'll be like Gears of War, a third person shooter, but with some special features and our own style which we'll be talking about later", explains the designer of VD DEV to this magazine.
"We have been working with portables since the first Gameboy. It's like a loving relationship with their machines. When the 3DS launched we knew we were going to have fun because its technology can bridge the gap between portables and consoles", he says.
To work on this project, the studio didn't choose any third party graphics engine, instead they programmed their own graphics technology from scratch, an engine they have decided to name "Big Bang Engine", optimized for Nintendo 3DS.
"It is an engine written from scratch, we spent months of work (days and nights) in order to optimize it for ARM technology. Thanks to all this time working we have learned to connect to the console graphics processor to get the best out of it", they commented.
In the absence of more details on the campaign, VD DEV confirms that Iron Fall will not have a multiplayer mode due to a matter of resources and size of the studio, although it may be introduced in the future "if the game is successful".
