page_title: Kid Icarus: Uprising
section_title: Design
hierarchical_section_title: Kid Icarus: Uprising / Development / Design
caption_attribution_description: English: A Nintendo 3DS in Aqua Blue, photo taken during the 3DS launch event in NYC.
context_page_description: Kid Icarus: Uprising is a third-person shooter video game developed by Project Sora and Sora Ltd. and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 3DS handheld video game console. Released worldwide in March 2012, it is the third installment in the Kid Icarus franchise; the first to be released since Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters in 1991; and the first worldwide release since the original game in 1986. It is also the only video game to be made by Project Sora before it shut down in 2012.
  Kid Icarus: Uprising takes place in a setting based loosely around Greek mythology. The main protagonist is the angel Pit, servant of the Goddess of Light Palutena. When the Goddess of Darkness Medusa returns to destroy humanity, Pit goes on missions first against her, then against the forces of Hades, Lord of the Underworld and the source behind Medusa's return. During gameplay, players control Pit during airborne rail shooter segments and ground-based third-person shooter segments. In addition to the single-player campaign, multiple multiplayer modes are available, with competitive modes available for up to six players.
context_section_description: In November 2008, after Sakurai was given the go-ahead to develop Uprising, he rented out an office in Takadanobaba, a district of Tokyo. At this stage, due to the game's platform still being in early development, there were no development tools available for Sakurai to use. Between November and March 2009, Sakurai finalized his vision for the game. During this period, to help design the game's settings and characters, Sakurai hired several outside illustrators to work on concept art: these artists were Toshio Noguchi, Akifumi Yamamoto and Masaki Hirooka. The art style was inspired by manga. In January 2009, development studio Project Sora was established for Uprising's development. At its inception, it had a staff of 30. With the start of active recruitment in March 2009, the game officially entered development: at the time, it was the very first game to be in development for the new platform. During this early stage, due to the lack of platform specific development tools, the team were developing the game on Wii hardware and personal computers. The changing specifications of the developing hardware resulted in multiple features undergoing major revisions. This hardware instability led to a protracted development cycle: in the event, the team managed to fully utilize the platform's capabilities, doing detailed work on how many enemies they could show on the screen at any one time. Debugging also took a long time due to the size and variability of gameplay built into Uprising.
  From the start, Uprising was meant to be distinct from the original Kid Icarus: while Kid Icarus was a platformer featuring horizontal and vertical movement from a side-scrolling perspective, Uprising shifted to being a fully 3D third-person shooter broken between airborne and ground-based segments in each chapter. Much of the game's depth and scale came from Sakurai's own game design philosophy, along with the inclusion of various weapon types that opened up different strategic options. The number of weapons available in-game was decided from an early stage, as Sakurai wanted solid goals for the development team so development would go smoothly. The original Kid Icarus was notorious for its high difficulty, but this was an aspect Sakurai wanted to tone down so that casual gamers could enjoy Uprising. For this reason, the Fiend's Cauldron was created as a user-controlled means of both setting difficulty and allowing players to challenge themselves by placing bets against their performances. The Fiend's Cauldron tied into the game's overall theme of "challenge". The game's difficulty was one of the three key elements decided upon by Sakurai, alongside the music and light-hearted storyline. The addition of the AR Card game was based on Sakurai's wish to fully utilize the 3DS' planned features, and was inspired by the trophy viewing option from Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Due to the volume of cards produced, the team needed to create a special system based on a colorbit, an ID recognition code along the bottom edge of a card. After consideration, it was decided to have the "Idol" displays able to fight each other, with battles revolving around a stat-based rock-paper-scissors mechanic. It also provided a means for players to measure the strength of characters without directly connecting their consoles.
  While the game had fast-paced action and a high difficulty, its control scheme was designed to be relatively simple. This was because Sakurai had observed equivalent console games using all the buttons on a console's controller, creating a barrier for first-time players. To open up the game for newcomers while keeping gameplay depth, the team took the three basic controls and combined them with the game's structure. In later interviews, Sakurai said that the team had great difficulty properly incorporating the control scheme into the game. Their initial goal was to fully utilize the 3DS' processing power, which left little room for incorporation of elements such as the Circle Pad Pro, which was created fairly late in the game's own development cycle. Due t
caption: Kid Icarus: Uprising was designed to take full advantage of the Nintendo 3DS' capacities. Due to being developed alongside its platform, Uprising was faced with multiple problems related to the hardware and controls.[7][14]
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