So is Wiiware like XBLA

?

http://www.developmag.com/news/29337/US-WiiWare-to-launch-on-May-19th

You'll have to excuse me being woefully out of date with current-gen consoles, but I know that lots of indie developers are making stuff for XBLA which can be downloaded and played on the XBox360 right? Is Wiiware going to be the same sort of thing (or does something like that already exist for Wii?)

What are people using to write the games? C++ and an emulator on their PC? Also how easy is it to put those test games on the Wii/XBox 360 to see what it's really like. It must be nice writing for a single piece of hardware with known fixed specifications. Have people made frameworks for those consoles (probably Microsoft and Nintendo ones). Any info you have is appreciated. I'm not planning on doing it myself (too busy, although perhaps for fun), I'm just interested. Thx.

Really they should have called it "Live wii" or something ;-)

Grey

- check out XNA at microsoft.com its a free library for dev windows and xbox games which sits in the Visual C# Express Edition 2005 of Visual Studio - and is rather excellent.

I have no idea what Wii is using as a dev platform sorry.

IPete2.

You could use Unity V2 but that involves thousends of dollars as they still prefer milking you for console development.

IPete2: I should guessed it would be c# for the Microsoft console. Thx.

Taumel: So what's Unity V2 for? XBox or Wii (suppose I could do a search, sigh ;-))

I think Torque is available for Wii dev.

@Grey
I thought the question was after Wii development, anyway it's Wii. Interested in buying?

I really want to know how much wiiware will cost. I think if I really worked on it, Ninjah would be perfect for the wii :)

If you're interested in selling a game on any of the consoles, my friends who know (because they do) tell me to forget about Wii and XBLA because they're already loaded down with more submissions than they know what to do with and at this point they're turning down quality games from developers who already have games on the networks. Sony are currently more approachable than the other two, but I don't expect that will last long.

EDIT: I should probably have pointed out that XBLA isn't the only option on XBox. They have some other shareware-style channel in the making apparently. Don't ask me anything, because I don't know any more.

@taumel: Yeah I guess it was about Wii but I also asked about frameworks for Xbox and Wii. So Unity is for Wii, OK thx.

Gabriel: Wow OK, that's worth knowing, so does it mean that people should give in if they don't have the right contacts/bribe money?

Gabriel: so will this make any difference? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7255866.stm

Is Wiiware like XBLA -> No, nintendo was to stupid to think of enough storage space for more than 6 games ...

I wouldn't say give up, but I'd be extremely wary of developing something with XBLA in mind unless I already had the contacts. And as I say, even if you have the contacts, it's no guarantee. PomPom games have managed to get back on XBLA, but I know other developers with an XBLA title already published who are just being left hanging for months on their next game.

Obviously there will be new games which will make it onto XBLA - it's not like Microsoft are going to turn down an amazing game - but at this stage, it looks like they'll be games that Microsoft go looking for rather than vice versa.


That's what I meant when I said they had some new channel coming up. As I say, I know nothing about it other than there was word they were finally going to open up the XNA creators club to the general public, and that revenue generation was even going to be possible. The key thing would be how revenue is collected and how it's shared, and no one I know has that information. Or if they do, they're pretending they don't :P

If it's wide open, then presumably free games will be competing with non-free games, there will be vast quality variations, so it's hard to predict what kind of reception it's going to get among XBox users.

This was brought up a while ago by someone at Lyon GDC.

http://www.developmag.com/news/28897/Lyon-GDC-How-to-succeed-in-casual-games

@Gabriel
If you're going to develop with XNA you can do both win and Xbox360. So until you do a lot of weird shader stuff shouldn't be this hard doing a crossrelease mith maybe one primary platform in mind.

About the Wii i heard the same. It seems to be a little bit like with the GameBoy Advanced. Everyone want to develop for and maybe only a few may be successful. Really depends on the game concept and that it makes porper usage out of the controller.

Gabriel: OK thanks for the info.

Evak: So not cheap then ;-)

Taumel: Actually, that's a good point about the controller. If you were developing for Wii on a PC, how would you test the controller! There must be some kinda kit...

Unity is Mac only and there you can use the controller with your Mac. But as i said this is an expensive route as you (or your publisher) has to buy a) Unity V2 Pro, b) The WiiWare Devkit and c) The Unity Wii licence.

I'm under NDA for both XBLA & WiiWare, but I'll just say I don't think XBLA is a viable option for under-funded indies. It will take you hundreds of thousands of dollars to get on and complete an XBLA title and that's if you can get past the greenlight committee.

As for WiiWare, again I'm under NDA but... a more viable option (for now).

Also, spec's-wise, the Wii is a lot closer to what most indie games target than a 360. My XBLA game requires a 3ghz PC / 1gb ram / w/ATI 1950 or above to run effectively. My WiiWare game runs on my old 1ghz laptop w/some built-in crap grfx card.

Either way, if you're not going to roll your own engine, I'd say Torque or Unity are your best options. There are a lot of idiosyncrasies and compliance issues on consoles and any leg-up on those things, the better. Also, I advise avoiding anything that's net-play-centric, unless your engine already supports it fully, because it's not easy to do.

So, if you've got a great idea and a prototype / running game, it's not out of the question to get on either of the 3 consoles, but it's not going to be easy.

Now, if you just want to throw your game out there, there's the whole XNA XBLA thing, but you can't make any money off of that.

OK thanks for the info, very interesting. Did you write those games for Reflexive (or did you write them before Reflexive)?