News "We Were So Stumped" - Nintendo On The 'Unorthodox' Development Of Alarmo

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Nintendo has just done the most Nintendo thing imaginable and announced something that no one asked for while we're all waiting for something very specific that we're all asking for.

That said, Nintendo Sound Clock: Alarmo looks pretty darn cool; one of those things that we really didn't think we wanted, but are now absolutely itching to get our hands on. According to an Ask the Developer interview with the creative team at Nintendo, however, getting Alarmo to the finish line wasn't quite smooth sailing.

Tetsuya Akama and Yosuke Tamori sat down to discuss the Alarmo project and the specific challenge of having software developers and hardware developers collaborating so closely together on a single project. Supposedly, this particular mix of teams led to some misunderstandings during development that made it all the more challenging:

Tamori: The gulf between our respective development cultures and personalities led to quite a few...differences in understanding. (Laughs) Relatively speaking, Akama-san and I are designers, so we tend to use abstract words. But fuzzy expressions are difficult to understand for system software programmers and hardware engineers who are used to creating things with precision. If we go up to them and share how we want to improve the responsiveness further, they'll ask for specifics like, "Well, then how many seconds is acceptable?"
Akama: Or if we tell them, "Make it go boing!," the programmers might come back with, "Define boing."

The pair even went so far as to state that development came to a complete standstill due to the differences in development culture and the exacerbation that the Covid-19 pandemic caused in the middle of the project:

Tamori: At one point, we were so stumped on the development of Alarmo that we put everything on hold and set aside a week to go and make whatever we wanted instead.

Thankfully, of course, everything came together in the end. Tamori and Akama even brought along a couple of prototype alarm clocks used during development. The more cuboid variant came with a dot matrix LED display rather than the LCD screen seen in the final build, while the latter variant is much closer in design to the finished product.

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Nintendo Sound Clock: Alarmo is now available for order in North America and Canada for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers. It will become available in Europe later this week, while a retail release is currently planned for early 2025.