“Super Ubie Land” was released on August 13, 2013 for Mac/PC/Linux. In early 2014, “Super Ubie Land” will be released onto the Nintendo WiiU eShop under a different title (which has not yet been revealed… anticipation!).

Being an indie game-developer is a lot like being an indie musician. Anyone who’s unsigned can call himself “indie,” but there is a difference between Macklemore and a self-proclaimed “underground artist.” At Notion Games, we’ve been fortunate enough to have other people recognize us as successful indie-developers. No, we’re not Phil Fish, but we’re also not at the bottom of the barrel. We’re right where we need to be right now, and we’re growing every day.

Hello, everyone. I’m Matthew Jones. I am one of the Notion Games guys. Mostly, I’m the guy who writes stuff. With me is Ben Ward — one of the programmers at Notion Games — to talk about his experience in the indie community and about porting our game, “Super Ubie Land” over to the WiiU. Here’s what he had to say:

MATTHEW: When converting Super Ubie Land from HTML5 to C#, do you just go line by line and plug in the assets?

BEN: Due to the nature of Construct — the program we used to make Super Ubie Land — most of the automated features have to be re-coded. For the assets, I can reuse numbers like coordinates or animation speeds, but a lot has to be reworked too. It involves some experimenting to create formulas to convert numbers to a different system and still output the same thing.

MATTHEW: Every programmer out there knows that sometimes programming “goes wrong,” and you can spend hours troubleshooting a problem. Since the HTML5 code already exists for SUL, do you find that you run into fewer problems, or is converting the code just as troublesome as writing the code from scratch?

BEN: Porting a game can take less time than making a game from scratch, but there are just as many complications when converting code or writing it from scratch. I would say there are more complications for the Wii U version than the original because the automatic features we relied on for the original game are no longer there. We are also using a more advanced computer program than before, so it naturally takes more work.

MATTHEW: So do you get to play around with top-secret Nintendo hardware while you’re working?

BEN: Yes! The development hardware for Nintendo is quite interesting. I’m not sure what I’m allowed to say about confidential equipment, but you can always find these sorts of things in the media or on the internet. Asides from the hardware, working with Nintendo’s software, staff, websites, all of it feels really unique. I’m looking forward to getting to play around with more hardware in the future.

MATTHEW: I’m sure a lot of people out there want to know how you got this gig as a programmer for Notion. Talk about that for minute. How did you present yourself so that you got the attention of Notion?

BEN: I met Andrew through the Construct forums a year ago. I worked on different jobs and with different people, but I always kept a close eye on the Help Wanted section. He posted asking for a programmer to help port from Construct to Unity. I knew how to work with those programs so naturally I told him I could do the job. A little bit after I started working he found a small team already working with Nintendo to do the porting and apologized to me.

I was disappointed for losing that opportunity, but I decided not to give up. I asked to work on other projects with [the team] and got to work with a few games, including Super Ubie Land and Up Up Ubie. I eventually earned their trust and became a part of [the dev team for] “Team Notion the Game” replacing the programmers that replaced me. All of it feels like an inspiring chain of events. I’m really glad I put in the effort.

MATTHEW: That was very illuminating. Thanks, Ben. Can’t wait to see “Super Ubie Land” (or whatever the name ends up being) on the Nintendo WiiU eShop!”