Hi peeps, there's something that's been bugging my head for some weeks and I wanted to discuss with you to have more opinions. Me and my team have been developing a game for a few months (although we haven't started doing much press movement yet, terrible mistake) and besides releasing on PC I was thinking about porting and releasing on a console, just for the sake of it. Of course, full homebrew way, not through an official release channel but as a homebrew game. The two platforms that I've got flying around on my head are the Dreamcast and... The Nintendo DS (the original DS that is). The game could fit quite well on both platforms, developing for both platforms is easy enough and publishing for the Dreamcast is quite feasible, and a short run could have it's market. But the NDS is a different story, how much of a terrible idea is selfpublishing a homebrew DS game? That is, on a game cart, with a box and manual, like Dreamcast or Mega Drive games are released. Nintendo has dropped support for the original NDS but maybe it is way too soon to get doing this kind of stuff. Makes me wonder if it would mean a forever ban for our team on official licensing platforms... Any thoughts or ideas people?
I don't really think that Nintendo DS community is as alive as Dreamcast, so, in my opinion, it's kinda a miss idea.
Boy howdy that would get expensive to produce. Also, I've never seen any DS homebrew on its own cartridge. There's flash carts, obviously, and bootlegs, but if you want a standalone cart you'd probably either have to reverse engineer the relevant parts out of an existing flash cart so you can make your own, talk to one of the bootleggers (probably the best option for a professional looking product, if you manage to contact one), or sell flash carts that boot into your game (maybe through a hacked menu). I would not do it, but major kudos to you if you have the balls to try.
You may try to contact the developpers of Diamond Trust of London. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Trust_of_London They may answer few of your questions regarding small quantity publishing on Nintendo DS. But has you want to publish your game as an homebrew, this may be irrelevent.
Maybe, maybe not, but if you are looking at doing a commercial PC release, don't bother with a "homebrew" or unlicensed release of any form. It will make you look bad to the average gamer and has the potential to get you in trouble with the average lawyer.
Bob, is that you? What do you mean "look bad to the average gamer"? I don't know where you're coming from with that but I don't think that the "average gamer" cares that his indie shooter on steam is also available on the Dreamcast or other obsolete consoles without a license. And legally*, it's OK to do games for a console without a license (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade). Nintendo might not want anything to do with you if you publish to one of their consoles without a permission though... making an unlicensed DS game might lock you out from working on newer Nintendo platforms in the future (Retro City Rampage's creator had in his website a lot of info on NES reverse engineering, and his game started as "Grand Theftendo", a game for the NES... Nintendo agreed to allow his game in their platform only if he removed everything about their consoles from his site) *I am not a lawyer, and if you're using a forum post as legal counseling for your million dolar company you're an idiot.
The average gamer is going to see that something on Steam is also available on the Dreamcast and think: "oh, this must be a port of an old game". DS might have less of an issue, but it still looks "old" from a potential marketing perspective. In my view, it also looks wasteful: "they ported a game to a dead platform instead of fixing bugs/adding features/porting to current systems". Legally, yes you could release for those platforms IF you went through the process of completely reverse engineering the platform. I'm going to make the assumption that DMCA-protected sources would be used in some form, hence the potential legal issues.
That makes sense. And I always forget about good old Digital Millenium Copyright Act, that might be an issue indeed.
Thanks a lot to all of you for the insight. Actually I think that Dreamcast releasing isn't that much of a problem even today, games are still being released for the platform and it has it's user base. But after putting more thought on it I guess you're right about the NDS being too recent to be playing with homebrew publishing.
I agree, don't publish NDS. However, as far as the "average gamer", I asked one half my age, and they didn't understand the logic. He had vaguely heard of Dreamcast. Also, he plays "old games" on his phones (yes, plural -- both iOS and Android, it's a thing I guess.)
Volgarr the Viking was eventually released for free on the DC and it didn't seem to affect its sales. It might be a good idea to hold on a bit after the official release to release it on DC though, might even give you small publicity boost and make people talk about the game. Most people don't have a dc/won't bother burning a CD-R and it might actually benefits you. What kind of game are you working on?
The game is Tower of Elements, a 2D puzzle-plataforming game. Using four magical powers, you have to complete all the puzzles to progress further up the tower and unveil the mistery it hides. The gameplay is quite slow-paced, you have to think what steps to take to solve the puzzles and how to time you correctly to go over moving platforms, avoid enemies, etc. It's somewhat inspired in games like Tecmo's Solomon no Kagi. Here's a gameplay video I just recorded so you can see how it works. Sorry for the lack of audio, but my dev machine is absolute crap and it struggles to record video let alone at somewhat steady 60 FPS. This is one of the 50 something levels in the game, I completed it fairly fast because I know how to solve it but I tell you, you'll need time to be able to solve them...
