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N makes it to the closed platforms

May 24th, 2007 (Visited 2103 times) Tags:

More and more indie titles seem to be popping up o nthe platforms from the major platform holders. The latest to make the leap is N, the Ninja game from a couple of years back. It’ll be on PSP and on XBLA.

I’m kinda torn — I’d love to have it on a portable platform, but I have to admit I almost never dust off my PSP (actually, I own two of them, believe it or not — one back at 1.5 for homebrew, and a fully current one).

The interesting thing, to me, though, is that so many of these titles are making this leap. Part of me wonders what the attraction is — could a PSP or XBLA version ever garner as many players as the download version did? Is the drive revenue, or being able to say you’re actually on a console? Or is being on a console effectively a way to cut through the downloadable market noise, and thus garner significant distribution?

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Ola Fosheim Grøstad said on May 25th, 2007 at 2:21 am:

Interesting!

I don’t know much about console deveopment and publishing, but I’ve heard that the PS3 etc are very expensive to develop for. Which is a shame. Sony customers will loose access to some free MMOs for sure… Are there any consoles indies can develp for without having any major backing? (Requiring an investment of less that $10000.) Is it for instance possible to get a PS3-linux client distributed in a manner which makes it accessible for all PS3 users as a free download?

I’m interested in learning about consoles where users can freely establish a network connection to a server without being forced to connect to a commercial hub. (Tell me to shut up, if this is the wrong place to ask

Rich Bryant said on May 25th, 2007 at 3:23 am:

Networking is not currently possible without very large expense and difficult certification process, but the XBox 360 now supports free homebrew gaming – sharable for a $99 yearly subscription. I doubt if i’m the only one that believes the subscription charge is not likely to be a long-running thing.

Anyway. http://www.xna.com/

Ola Fosheim Grøstad said on May 25th, 2007 at 4:42 am:

Ack… Not even on the puny Wii? Unfortunately, XNA isn’t really suitable if it requires C#. I was hoping that indies could develop for win/mac/linux + one console reusing most of their C++ code, without killing themselves or their families.

Rich Bryant said on May 25th, 2007 at 10:13 am:

Well, Mac and linux are both beneficiaries of the Mono project (open-source .NET) which is pretty stable. I’ve coded server apps on both platforms using it.

Andrew said on May 26th, 2007 at 5:24 am:

Getting on to XBLA is a real way to return a profit, particularly for indies. If they can afford to pay for development themselves, then they’ll gather the majority of the revenue, which for many games will be around $500,000. For the developer.

SO if there is an offer, you’d be nuts to pass it up.

However, I’m not convinced there is infinite space for indie cross overs either – its very much going to be hit driven like everything else.

Chocorisu said on May 27th, 2007 at 6:47 pm:

Technically since XNA uses the .NET ecosystem there’s no reason why one couldn’t use Managed C++ without a huge rewrite. Not that managed C++ is very nice to use, but relatively speaking…

Alternatively, how about writing most of the game logic using something like Python and use IronPython as an interpreter? There’s little reason to write an entire game in C/C++ these days.

Or as Rich said, write the whole thing in C# and use Mono, which is very stable these days.

Ola Fosheim Grøstad said on May 28th, 2007 at 3:30 am:

Chocorisu, I suppose you’re right. At least for programs that are more GPU than CPU heavy. I am more into dynamic things (real-time synthesis) so I dislike giving up control over memory and execution with no sure way to optimise things if speed is lacking.

Brent the Closet Geek said on May 28th, 2007 at 8:57 am:

N may be the thing to actually make me buy a PSP. I’ve been dying for that game on a handheld since its release.