The Nintendo Homebrew Conundrum
When people think of homebrew software, they usually think of it running on a PC, and not a dedicated handheld console. It’s also common knowledge that Nintendo is the hardest of the “big three” to get a license to develop for; if you’re an indie company, there’s no bar at all to developing for the PC, and you have a fair shot at getting licensed by Microsoft or Sony (heck, Sony even released the Yaroze, and the Playstation 2 Linux kit), but if you show up at Nintendo asking for a license without half a dozen triple-A titles under your belt, the receptionist presses the “silent emergency” button under her desk, and a Club Nintendo Special Forces team rapelles down from the ceiling, rolls you up in an old Power Pad, and throws you in Lake Washington.
It therefore makes no goddamned sense that, while the PSP appears to be the handheld of choice for emulation, it’s on Nintendo’s handhelds, over ANY console, that the most strides are being made in homebrew and amateur game development. Here’s a quick rundown of the highlights:
France appears to be the hotbed of DS homebrew. Omalone, a colorful and challenging port of the board game Abalone, was the first homebrew game for the DS I heard of. Every ExteNDS is, naturally, a port of Every Extend, which is still in development but looks and sounds perfect since O-MEGA used common formats for his models and sounds, and made no attempt to obfuscate them.
The Gameboy Advance is where development has really taken off, though, due to a huge development and support community (link link), robust programming environments like HAM and DevkitPro, and the fact that Gameboy Advance cartridge burners are incredibly easy to find and use. Games of note include Blast Arena Advance, an original “bullet dodger” that the creator distributed in a small run on cartridges (probably inspired by gbadev.org’s 2004 competition, the winning games from which were distributed on cartridges), a Lumines port named Gleam, and my own (in more ways than one, ahem) personal favorite, Season Stacker, the first Gameboy Advance game submitted to the Independent Games Festival. Suprisingly, the Japanese doujin community has only just recently jumped on the GBA homebrew bandwagon; most notably Chinchilla Soft’s Ayu Ayu Panic, featuring the omnipresent Tsukimiya Ayu and Takayama Fumihiko’s BulletGBA, a program for practicing bullet-hell-pattern-dodging.
Despite all the “Blue Oceans” talk, and although there are a few 3rd-party Nintendo-licensed publishers that will sort of “sneak” polished homebrew games into the market, there’s no way that Nintendo’s going to ease up on their licensing, continuing the bizarre conundrum that, although Nintendo probably has the largest number of active and innovative developers, they have significantly less licensed developers than either Sony or Microsoft.
April 14th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
Word from the luminous “N” up on the hill is that Revolution is supposed to be a lot more indie-friendly. Kits are $2,000, and the noises they made sounded vaguely like they were going to be friendlier to small studios.
Odd, though, that the developer with the greatest reputation for design quality and ingenuity by far has been the one to make it the hardest for aspiring designers to make games for their system.
April 15th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
It’s very interesting and very exciting to me that, rather than horsepower, the hot topic of this round of console releases is “indie support”. Microsoft’s already stepped to the plate by licensing a lot of indie games for XBox360 Live Arcade, and now both Sony and Nintendo are being pressed on the issue and scrambling to come up with something. I honestly hope that this does create new opportunities for indie game design; it would certainly be timely in light of all the horrible “sweatshop” and stagnation news that’s come to light about big developers.