They spent about a year on the conversion and, although they got the game to work on the original 3DS, its performance was sub-optimal. McMillen and Nicalis, after tailoring the game to run on more powerful systems, worked to keep it intact for the 3DS port. They continued to work within Nintendo, and secured approval of Rebirth 's release for the 3DS and Wii U in 2014. During development, three senior Nintendo employees-Steve Singer, vice president of licensing Mark Griffin, a senior manager in licensing, and indie development head Dan Adelman-championed the game within the company. Local cooperative play would also be added to the game, but McMillen said that they could not add online cooperative play because it would drastically lengthen development time.
Rebirth was announced in November 2012 as a console version of The Binding of Isaac, with plans to improve its graphics to 16-bit colors and incorporate the new content and material originally planned for the second expansion. He also asked to be left out of the business side of the game's release (after his negative experiences dealing with business matters with Super Meat Boy), and Rodriguez agreed. McMillen was interested, but required they recreate the game outside Flash to incorporate the additional content he had to forego and fix additional bugs found since release. Rodriguez offered Nicalis' services to help port The Binding of Isaac to consoles. Īfter The Binding of Isaac 's release, McMillen was approached by Tyrone Rodriguez of Nicalis (a development and publishing studio which had helped bring the personal computer games Cave Story and VVVVVV to consoles). Other rooms in the dungeons include special challenges and mini-boss fights. A player can only carry one reusable item and one single-use item, replacing it with another if found. The player can collect any number of passive items, whose effects build on previous ones (creating potentially powerful combinations). Some items are passive some are active and reusable (requiring the player to wait a number of rooms before they can reuse them), and others are single-use items which then disappear. Many items impact the character's attributes (such as speed and the damage and range of their tears) and other gameplay effects, including a character who floats behind the player-character and aids in combat. Throughout the dungeons, the player will find bombs to damage foes and destroy obstacles keys to open doors and treasure chests and coins to buy items. The character can find items which replenish hearts other items give the character additional hearts, extending their health. The player-character's health is tracked by a number of hearts.
The player moves their character around the screen, shooting their tears in other directions the tears are bullets which defeat enemies.
The game is controlled similarly to a multidirectional shooter.