Tonight at Nintendo’s Nindies@Night event at the EMP Museum in Seattle, Nintendo announced that the spaceship-building indie game Kerbal Space Program is coming to Wii U. They also brought the creators of the popular indie game Shovel Knight on stage to premiere the Shovel Knight amiibo.
In Kerbal Space Program, players build a spaceship from the ground up and then set destinations in space. You can play in Career Mode and manage your own space station or play in Sandbox Mode and just focus on building rockets.
“When we started Kerbal, we wanted to make something huge, something interesting. A dream project,” Miguel Piña, producer at Squad game studio, explained to the crowd of Nintendo fans.
With the Wii U version of the game, players will be able to use the GamePad to plan their space travel before executing launch on the big screen. Plus, players will get an inside view of their cockpit during flight. You will get to control the ship from within.
“It’s really fun and also really scary when you crash,” Piña laughed.
Kerbal Space Program is already available on Steam, and it will be launching simultaneously on Wii U, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
Up next, Sean Velasco and Nick Wozniak from Yacht Club Games came onstage to discuss the new free update to Shovel Knight, called Plague of Shadows. Plague of Shadows lets you play Shovel Knight as the villain Plague Knight.
“It’s everything from the original Shovel Knight campaign, just twisted in a whole new way,” the developers explained, “The levels are slightly different, the gameplay is slightly different.”
But the big news came a couple of minutes later when the host of the event, Damon Baker of Nintendo of America, tried to play a Shovel Knight video clip. What was projected instead onto the giant screen was a single still image of the Shovel Knight amiibo, to loud applause.
“That’s not the video!” Baker laughed. “But it’s pretty beautiful, I have to say. Let’s just gaze at its glory.”
The amiibo will allow Shovel Knight players on the Wii U to play co-op mode, plus it will introduce new challenge stages and allow players to customize their Shovel Knight. 3DS players will have access to the same features minus the co-op mode.
This marks the first indie game amiibo ever released by Nintendo. Other lines of toys-to-life figurines, like Disney Infinity or Skylanders, are exclusive to single game franchises. This new amiibo shows that Nintendo is willing to work with indie games developers to give them access to this technology which may otherwise have been inaccessible.
