It's been a hot minute since the last part. I almost forgot about this entirely until I looked at my drafts. Would've been a shame if I never finished this before cohost died.
I worked at the infamous Wii shovelware developer Data Design Interactive for a short time right out of college and these are some of the interesting details from that time. The other parts are here (part 1), here (part 2) and here (part 3).
I mentioned it in part 3, but DDI has a system called NuYu, which was just a knockoff of Miis. There was a character creator where you could swap and recolor various parts of your very simplified avatar. It was very uninteresting in concept, but some interesting things happened around it.
First off, they weren't always called NuYus; the original name was Yuu. Nintendo did not like that Yuu was so similar to Mii and they very quickly threatened a lawsuit. They didn't care about the extremely Mii-like functionality - it was entirely the name they took issue with... at first.
Later on, another lawsuit came in from Nintendo. They were going hard on patent trolling even back in the Wii era, because they were suing over the concept of generating a static image from a 3d model, or something like that. Whenever you saved a NuYu, it would create a thumbnail image with the character's face so you could browse them at a glance. Well, apparently Nintendo tried to patent some part of that process. I believe the suit was dropped or dismissed, thankfully, because I don't think anything ever came from it - we were still using the same thumbnail process the whole time.
With that out of the way, let's get into My Personal Golf Trainer (you can even see my coworker Karl in this video). This was, as the name suggests, a golf trainer that tried to analyze your golf swing and help you fine tune it. You'd be swinging a wiimote though, so that alone invalidates a lot of it, since the weight of a club is a huge factor in how you swing. Despite that, MPGT was probably the most polished and professional-looking DDI game on the wii. This one wasn't really shovelware, but my experience with it is still pretty interesting.
First off, MPGT had already been released when I was hired, so once again my focus was on getting things ready for a PC port. One task for this was the iTrainer integration. So, when I said you'd be swinging a wiimote instead of a club, this is what was supposed to fix that. There was this little doohickey called an iTrainer which clips onto your real golf club and records the forces as you swing. It could also send swing data in real time over bluetooth (iirc), and that's what we wanted to feed into the game for instant analysis. I think I've blocked a lot of this think out of my mind, because I don't remember many specifics except that this iTrained thing fuckin' sucked. I remember having to power cycle this thing every 5 minutes because it disconnected and refused to reconnect.
A little trivia about MPGT now: it was apparently the most expensive wii game at retail. This bad boy sold for a full benjamin ($100 USD). Stewart told me they wanted to target the golfing enthusiast demographic, not just grannies and kids who wanted to swing wiimotes around, and that these golf guys didn't take it seriously as a training aide for $60 or under. Apparently a $100 price point gave it the feel of a real, legitimate tool instead of a game. I should note that the game also had David Leadbetter's name and face plastered all over it. He's a pro golfer or something (idk, i hate golf) that they roped into endorsing and advising on the project. So it was laser focused on golf nerds.
Anyway, back to what I was doing next. Last time I mentioned Stewart wanted to setup an online component where users log in with their DDI account, or something like that. With MPGT, he wanted it to go a step further. He wanted users to be required to log in with an account tied to a product key. To make it even more absurd there were no product keys yet. This wasn't going to be released on steam or any other established marketplace. This was going to be purchased and downloaded from the DDI site or something like that. That brings me to the most ridiculous thing from my time at DDI - Stewart wanted me, a junior programmer not even a year out of college to create a key generator and server backend for authentication, as well as a custom DRM system that will lock users out if they aren't authenticated. On top of that, he wanted me to implement a system for DLC where only purchased modules could be loaded.
The absurdity of that wasn't lost on me at the time but, again, the only two employees at the company were myself and Karl, the lead programmer who had designed a large portion of the GODS engine. I gave it my best attempt though. I had a server working with some basic authentication. I had basic checks for potential DLC modules (even though we didn't actually have any DLC made yet). I made a very simple key generator that would insert valid keys into the server database. I even added a few checks to make sure the authentication wasn't trivial to circumvent.
I had been working on this for well over a month and the end was nowhere in sight. We were months away from even having an idea of a release date, and major design changes were still coming in regularly, but Stewart was insistent that I put in overtime on this nonsense. I gave him an extra hour a day for a week before I finally accepted that it was time to get out. The next week I finally built up the courage to submit my 2 weeks notice. I still remember my voice shaking as I told Stewart I was quitting. One of the best choices I ever made though.
Not even a week later I got a call from a recruiter. I hadn't even expressed any interest in looking for work, or submitted any applications yet, but they called anyway, and at the perfect time. I remember sitting in my car during my lunch break and doing a phone interview. I managed to get that job and while it was less interesting than DDI, it was so much better in every other way.
