Topic: How to make your own dsiware game!

Does anyone know how to make a dsiware game as i would like to make own and send it to nintendo! my idea is this monster walking towards you and you have a gun an have to shot them the game would get harder as it went along! Do u want to make a dsiware game and if u do what would it be?

How to make your own dsiware game!

Um yeah..... I don't think it works that way. If every and anybody could submit DSiWare to Nintendo, it would be as clogged with useless apps as the iPhones.

The funny thing is that when you write that to Google, the first two links go to Nintendo Life (other one being this thread)

Which is the beauty of the app store. There may be alot of crap on the app store but apple does a good job of showing apps to us

The point of this thread isn't about how I feel about the iPhone's app store. It's about the OP wanting to submit DSiWare to Nintendo, which I said he can't, and gave a reason why he/she should have known that already, that being the mere fact that the DSi store isn't clogged with homemade apps already.

If you want to make a DSiWare game, you have to have a number of varying credentials to prove to Nintendo that you have the capacity to make something of moderate quality. And I'm not sure a pitch of, "there's a monster walking towards you, so you shoot it" would really impress anyone considering your license.

Its easyer to make a game for Wiiware then DSiware.
I am the one who a made Fireplacing for Wiiware
It took years to make, and some people died making it but in the end it was all worth it!

I believe you would have to buy a dev kit. The one for the 3DS was nearly $3000, so that should give you a rough estimate of the cost.

This may just be me, but if you want to develop a game for DSiWare, it probably makes more sense to develop it first for iDevices first (which have much cheaper dev kits btw), then port it to DSiWare. From what I've heard, it's way easier to make (and sell) a game to iDevices than DSiWare, so if you can't make an iDevice game work, DSiWare development probably isn't for you.

@Birdman - That's pretty much correct from a technical difficulty point of view although to produce something on the iDevices you need to use a bit of Objective C (or create the whole project entirely in Obj C) which is not really any use for anything other than Apple platforms (in my opinion).

If you are really determined to get something official onto DSiWare, then first of all you need to set up a company, with premises and experienced console development staff (preferably with some Nintendo console experience) and apply to Nintendo to become a registered developer. Then you need to make sure you can finance the development of your game. This doesn't just mean buying dev hardware and paying wages, you've got liability insurance to consider, costs of rating the game for the various territories, professional translations, you might want to hire someone to produce the audio... It all gets pretty expensive.

If you really want to get into game development, you'll need a LOT of practise. I'm making the assumption (feel free to corect me) that you don't have much programming experience. If that's the case it's probably be worth trying your hand at learning a programming language (pretty much anything will do, to get the feel for the general structure of programming. Language-specific syntax can be learnt later) and making a few simple games - not necessarily to sell, but just to get the feel for it.

My job requires me to do a lot of programming (in C++ mainly but a couple of other languages as well) and I'm not doing anything particularly advanced (no GUI or anything, just text outputs) - and just getting a robust grounding in the language took a good 6 months or so. That's after having moderate programming experience before-hand. I've peeked at what it takes to make a game, and that requires learning whole new libraries if you don't want to code everything from scratch yourself.

I'm not trying to discourage you, but just be aware that programming is pretty involved - multiply that by a lot if you plan to do art and sound yourself too. Someone like ImDiggerDan could help you for the DSi specifically, but there are plenty of tutorials on the net to get started.

C++ probably isn't the best language to get started in, but it's what I know best. You'd want a development platform (Linux is pretty good, and free, but you'd want to be moderately computer-savvy) and download some C++ compilers as well as a library like SDL that has a lot of the graphical functions built-in.

If you don't want to go down the programming road, you could always develop your idea and pitch it to a games development company who would do the programming. I'm not sure how successful that is, but it'd be worth a shot.

EDIT: There are also game development programs out there that let you make games without needing a lot (or any) programming experience and are largely drag-and-drop. Obviously that limits what you can do, but at least it would let you get a feel for the process of coming up with a game idea, refining it, and putting it into practice without sinking lots of time into learning the nuts and bolts.

Anyway, I'll shut up now - there's people here with far more knowledge about the process than me!

Sure you did... - _ -

Why does everyone refer to iDevices when talking about mobile/smartphone/tablet games? What about Android and Windows Phone 7?

Are you suggesting he didn't? Just to let you know, I created all the music for it. It was long and hard, you should be ashamed

I refer to the non-dedicated gaming devices as iDevices because being politically correct in that case is annoying and inconvenient. Also, most games that are developed for mobile devices are first released for Apple devices (iPhone/iPod Touch, iPad) and then released for other app stores. Just know that, for me personally, I refer to non-dedicated mobile gaming devices collectively as iDevices.

Game design sounds confusing...

From my point of view I always talk about iDevices when talking smartphones because I wouldn't want to touch Android or Win Phone 7 development with the proverbial bargepole. I don't want to start an iOS/Android flame war going here - my reasoning is this: User base, return on investment and development difficulties.
WP7 has too small a user base and I think you have to use C#. On top of that I suspect there a huge fragmentation issue with different screen sizes, but I'm not that interested in it to find out for sure.

Android has a nice big user base, but they generally don't pay for apps (sweeping statement, I know, but true). You've also got fragmentation issues with the devices, the possible need to use Java for development which isn't very good for games and some horrible app size restrictions (which may have just been overcome but too late for one cancelled project I know of).

Yeah, and I want to make a game where a bunch of stuff happens and you get points for it. .

I nominate this for post of the year.