Interview: Niantic's Philip Marz on creating Pikmin Bloom
Pikmin Bloom is Niantic’s latest augmented reality game, but unlike the trend it set with the breakout sensation Pokémon GO, Pikmin Bloom takes things at a far slower pace. This is for those peaceful walks in the park, instead of those frantic Pokémon catching and battling sessions, opening the game up to a much wider potential audience.
We chatted to Niantic product marketing manager Philip Marz about Pikmin Bloom, how it was developed and what they hope to achieve with the game in the near future.
“Pikmin was the best choice for our purpose,” Marz tells us. While the world of Pikmin might be fraught with a few spooks and horrors, the creatures themselves are usually peaceful and idyllic, suiting the relaxed pace of Pikmin Bloom. “While Ingress and Pokémon GO have more ‘game’ features, we designed Pikmin Bloom to focus more on ‘walking’,” Marz continues. “We are hoping Pikmin Bloom will be a part of your everyday routine.”
The Pikmin creatures are one of Super Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s own designs, and of course, he was involved in designing Pikmin Bloom. “Niantic and Nintendo worked together to develop an app that combines Niantic’s real-world AR technology with Nintendo’s characters,” Marz explains. “It took a lot of discussion and a lot of trial and error to finally come up with Pikmin Bloom. Many people in Nintendo – including Mr. Miyamoto – were involved in this team and we think the two companies maximized one another’s strengths.”
Augmented reality games have become a hit ever since the launch of Pokémon GO, but data privacy concerns among users have become a bigger topic in the years since it launched, and many more people are hesitant to have their mobile device tracking their location at all times. We ask Marz what players can do if they share these concerns: “Pikmin Bloom – like all Niantic games – is a real-world game where the experience is tied to the player’s real-world location,” he says. “Therefore, we need to know where the player is in order to operate the game for them and to plan the location of in-game resources. If you want to delete all of your location history, you can do this by clicking ‘Delete All Your Location History’ in the settings.” Marz does, however, neglect to mention that the Google Fit app is also required in order for Pikmin Bloom to work properly.
Pokémon is a natural fit for an AR collection game, thanks to the hundreds of Pokémon and varieties there are in the series – Pikmin is a bit different, with only a handful of creatures. Niantic had to work around these constraints in order to still make a compelling collection game, and introduced Decor Pikmin: “In Pikmin Bloom, you will also meet Pikmin that are wearing unusual attire,” Marz explains. “Niantic and Nintendo both enjoyed designing each of the Decor Pikmin.”
While Marz is understandably cagey when talking about the potential future of Pikmin Bloom, he’s even less willing to talk about the recent closure of Niantic’s Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, saying nothing more than: “It was a hard decision to make. We’ll take all of the lessons we learned from Harry Potter: Wizards Unite into our other projects.” Hopefully anyone getting involved in Pikmin Bloom now doesn’t have to deal with a sudden closure in a few years.
Written by Dave Aubrey on behalf of GLHF.