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Students Create DS Game to Scoop Dev Prize
VonSnouty writes "We've heard a lot about how Valve's Portal was originally a Digipen student project, and Microsoft is also looking to tap the amateur scene by opening up its dev environment, XNA. But creating a prototype for a DS game? That's ambitious. A team of students in Scotland has just won a prestigious competition doing exactly that though, albeit using a Wacom tablet and a PC. The gameplay is an innovative mix of Pikmin, Pic Pax and Mario, and sounds pretty cool."
From TFA:
Go on, somebody give him a development kit.
Here you go.
I take it you don't quite understand what a Wacom tablet is...
My group at Tech's trying to do a DS Port too, although it probably won't look as fancy since we're just aiming to make a drawing program out of it.
Glad to see we're not the first.
From TFA:
Nintendo machines are traditionally hard for established companies to get a foothold on, let alone students.
Well, I'm a student, too, and I'm working on the port of Linux to the DS. And no, we do not have an official development kit. We use gcc and tools supplied by the homebrew community.
And there are countless others who are developing games and other applications, too. I'd say most of them are students. See here
Another difference to what TFA describes and the homebrew scene is that the homebrew scene is largely open source.
Since the team couldn't actually get hold of a DS development kit, Metalheads was made on a PC using a Wacom tablet in place of a touchscreen.
Doh. They obviously haven't informed themselves well before writing the game. They could have written it for real hardware and tested it on real hardware. See here
DS development is quite pleasant and easy to get into. It's about $80 in hardware (for a flash GBA card - $40 more if you can't find a proper Wifi card to run WifiMe) - or free if you're satisfied with emulation (which you probably shouldn't be). The hardware has a few tricks, but so does every platform. The information on development is extremely easy to find (try "Google") - there's plenty of tutorials, samples, and what not to get you started.
The game itself looks ambitious and was probably a fair bit of work - but claiming he can't do it on the DS without help is decidedly unambitious if you ask me. Of consoles for homebrew, the DS has to be one of the most well documented/easiest platforms you'll find.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
'The gameplay is an innovative mix of Pikmin, Pic Pax and Mario, and sounds pretty cool.'
From TFA:
'As for the game, Metalheads, Millar describes it as "almost a merging of Pikmin, Lemmings, Abe's Oddysee and Flashback."'
You know, it's not actually that difficult to get into DS game development at all. The only significant hurdle is finding someone to pay to do the actual cart manufacturing. It's not god-awfully expensive, but it's more than I had originally expected; I wish I wasn't NDA bound to not give a number, but you can work out an upper bound with some common sense, and I'll just say "it's near that upper bound." If you can convince the people at Nintendo that you're not just going to turn around and sell the SDK, they'll usually sell you one for much cheaper than the price they quote on http://warioworld.com/. If you'd rather take the simple route and jus get going, the homebrew SDK is free, is GCC, and is quite easy to use.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
On warioworld.com, Nintendo has suggested learning to develop with "an API" (I recommend Allegro and OpenGL) and then either 1. using your demo to get a job with a licensee or 2. leasing office space in which to put your SDK. Nintendo doesn't license to developers in home offices.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
I should point out that it's Pac-Pix not Pic-Pax. As it's one of my favourite DS games I thought I should mention it! :)
In 1985, or even as late as 1993, developing games for a console was a real challenge. There were very restrictive constraints placed on the programmer. Memory was one of the most significant. The NES, for instance, had what amounted to 2 KB of Work RAM. The SNES provided the developer with a whopping 128 KB of Work RAM. The processors of such systems ran at between 1 and 3 MHz.
But look at what somebody developing for the Xbox 360 has at their disposal: 512 MB of RAM, and a PPC CPU with 3 cores running at 3.2 GHz. The CPU has a 1 MB L2 cache. The Xbox 360 has 512 times more RAM in its L2 cache alone than the NES had in total.
It was actually a technical challenge to write an NES game, let alone one that worked well and as intended. It took a lot of talent, a lot of time and effort, and a lot of expertise.
What these kids did may have been a good effort, but there's nothing remarkable about it. The technical difficulties they faced were likely none.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating a return back to the hardware and development techniques of the NES. I think we should just look at things in perspective, and see who faced the real challenges. Anybody who has programmed a console game in C# on hardware as powerful as the Xbox 360 has not done anything of serious note, at least from a technical standpoint.
I always understood that second party was when a software company develops exclusivly for a certain hardware company and is even allowed to use trademarks from the hardware company.
In the N64 era Rare was a second party and on the Gamecube Retro studios is one.
Interesting. My daughter is planning on attending DigiPen. One of their very public statements is that no game developed as a student project could be sold as a commercial game. Wonder how they are circumventing that? Are they hoping that the all of the publicity will force DigiPen to be magnanimous? Or is the project just so far removed from its original state that the developers can claim it's a new work?
We need to be able to mod "+1 Owned The Parent".