Why indie developers should consider making games
for the Nintendo 3DS!

The TLDR version is:

• Free to sign up
• Strong recent sales, a long life left in 3DS
• Library spanning 3 generations
• Good affordable hardware
• Great software features
• Sustainable ecosystem & eShop features:
  • Developer friendly rating & review system
  • Nintendo brand association
  • Higher value proposition
  • Not shovelware friendly
  • Not a flooded ecosystem
  • QR Codes - a visibility tool
• Path way to Switch
• Launching on a console

Firstly, I’ll start by saying, I’m no indie, I’m just an old hobbyist, so take all this with a grain of salt!
Also, if it’s not apparent by my (Playstation) site, I’m not a Nintendo FanBoy, but there’s a lot that impressed me with the 3DS!
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Visual Development for Crash Nitro Kart

Di Davies with Charles Zembillas, Joe Pearson and John Nevarez

When visual style is one of the distinguishing features of a game, it is important to recognize that an ad hoc approach is not a sure way to execute a strong visual direction. There are less than a handful of cases where such an approach has worked and usually there is a strong vision to begin with that helps guide the direction. The typical game development approach involves floundering around in hopes that a direction will magically appear; this naïveté can be the death of an original project and is easily remedied. If you know where to look, and know how to plan, resources are available that can help jumpstart the creative process and actually save production time.

As the scope of game projects attempt to match the entertainment value of feature film productions, game companies are specializing, adding new departments that mimic film production models, adopting a more disciplined approach to pre-production. This approach is not just necessary for monster budget games, but also for competitive more moderately budgeted games and game companies will look to feature film animation professionals and CG film professionals to help answer the call.

Using Crash Nitro Kart released for the Game Cube, Playstation 2, XBOX and GameBoy Advance, as an example of an approach to visual development, this article highlights some of the challenges faced and processes used by visualization teams at Vicarious Visions in Troy, NY and Animation Academy in Burbank, CA to bring a game vision into focus for a cartoon-style racer.

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Original post and comments from Atari Museum’s facebook group here
.
I dislike facebook and wanted a snapshot of this.
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- Draft -

A Net Yaroze Postmortem and gamedev lessons learnt

In 2016, I spent most of my spare time hacking away with the old playstation, Net Yaroze.
You can see all my Net Yaroze blog posts here.

My previous experience with the Net Yaroze was back in 1999.
I bought it after seeing a UK OPSM (Official PlayStation Magazine) demo disc video saying it was discounted:

At the time I was a IT student (Computer Science), I started in software development, programming C/C++, win32/MFC/OpenGL and Java.
But I majored in information systems (Enterprise), in the mid/late 1990’s business ERP products were all the rage!
It took me about a year to go through the manuals and Black Art of 3D Game Programming before actually starting anything substantial.
On my Christmas break of 2000 for 3 months, I remember being locked away in my room and crunching so hard, I was actually looking forward to the start of uni!
I learnt how to master the clunky 3D format and made a 3D side scrolling demo, with animated block people, very much like minecraft.

Click here to see/read more.

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Friend: Dino Dini (dndn1011)

Dino Dini, started his game development career in 1979 with the Acorn System (kit) and the BBC Micro (8bit micro computer)

In the late 80’s after university, he went on to make Kick off 1 & 2 and Player Manager games for the Atari ST and Amiga, 16bit micro computers.
Dino, received two Golden Joystick Award (Game of the Year) for both Kick off games.

Next he created GOAL! for Amiga, Atari ST, and ported it to the SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis calling it Dino Dini’s Soccer.

In the mid 1990’s he went to the USA and worked on many playstation 1 and N64 titles.
He then went on to teach game development in a Netherlander university.
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Friend: Robert Swan (Rob the Swan Dev)

Rob Swan, started his game development career in 1997 with the Net Yaroze 😄
He made some very well known games on the PS1, thanks to the Official Playstation Magazine (OPSM) Demo CD’s (PAL regions).
His most famous PS1 game being Adventure game:
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Up to 2015, it was still relatively hard to get an ‘indie’ (bedroom/hobby coded game) onto a console.
The only exception being Android consoles (micro consoles), now just called AndroidTV boxes.

A while ago I found out about the Xbox One Dev Mode, which was launched in March 31 2016.
It basically turns any retail XBox One into a UWP device (Windows10) and you can target it via Visual Studio 2015 (community edition is free), Unity3D also has UWP support.

This feature, is still new, with UWP officially launching on XBox in 2017.
You need a DevCenter license (19USD once off) which lets you put apps on the Microsoft store.

When the XBox is in Dev Mode mode, it’s limited in memory and CPU’s it can use.

I’m not interested in using C# nor DirectX, but there is a Microsoft openGL wrapper called Angle which is in C++ and supports UWP.

This is pretty good of Microsoft to do this!

Sony unfortunately, doesn’t have a real ‘indie’ friendly platform, requiring a business entity.

More Info:
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