DS development

[soundguy]

Hello


Here are some tough questions that are on the mind of adventure game developers.

I wonder about what it's like to develope adventure games for DS.
When approaching adventure game development for PC as an independent developer you are offered many tools, engines, code samples, and other goodies that help you ease your way into actual game creation, and not lose focus on building a game engine.

What is it like if you would want to develop a game that run on DS (and other platforms you have experience with ? ) ?
Where do you start with, and where is a good place to seek help ?

What's the diffrence in costs while developing for DS (and other non-pc platforms) other than owning a DS ? Do you need to pay license fee to the console creator, like Nintento ? How do you manufacture and distribute the game cards ?

How successful commercially are games for DS ?
The sales figures for adventure games on PC have been published in Just adventrue, but to consider the DS as a viable market, us indies lack some needed data. can you share some of you knowedge about it ?

Thanks in advance !
Oded

[Georg_Sproing]

Actually we have our in-house developed engine, and apart from official Nintendo libraries we don't use third party tools for DS development. I guess the biggest problem for an indie developer is to get a Nintendo development kit, which is quite essential for programming and testing stuff - the dev kits are not that expensive, but Nintendo unfortunately doesn't sell them to anyone. If your game is not that big you can use a DS emulator, but that helps you only so far. Once you have a game or a prototype you have to convince a publisher to actually buy your game and publish it (forget about game design docs, most publishers want to see something more substantial).

The success of DS games varies, but it's safe to say that almost all publishers take on only games which have a potential to be successful...

[axelkothe]

How do you manufacture and distribute the game cards ?

I think they are all manufactured by Nintendo.

[Noone]

So you simply added nintendo libraries to your engine (it is called Vision, right?)?

[Georg_Sproing]

No, vision was the 3D graphics engine we used for the PC game. As Dual Motives is not 3D we don't use Vision. Our in-house engine allows us to use any graphics engine we want, but for the DS we use our own.