Topic: A place for indie developers to post and share their Nintendo Switch Titles.

Currently there's no such place on your forums, got a thread locked for advertising, which is wholly understandable, but perhaps a bit of a shame as well. with the ongoing switch popularity communities like this might make for a welcome place for the growing number of Nintendo authorized smaller "indie"game developers.

@muppetpuppet hmm, that's not a bad idea... I guess we could make a forum where only "approved" developer accounts can create threads... showcase their games or ask readers questions. Is that what you were thinking?

indeed, I have no idea how many will. but Nintendo has been reaching out to indie developers for a while now, so there's a sizeable number of studio's and individuals running around with Edev and Sdev kits . And promoting your Indie game is often the same as seeking feedback and such., It's not entirely unlike advertising, but its also not . As its posting works in progress and reaching out to a future audience for feedback.

There's tons of indie communities, but I haven't found any with a nintendo focus, seeing as most indiedevs stick to PC or mobile. Which in a sense is doing some of the hard work for you, as it leaves only developers serious and experiences enough to be given acces to nintendo dev tools

the only thing offcourse is that we can't share any specifics on the devkits and such themselves, that is under NDA with nintendo which you have to sign when receving developer status. But you can share your game and game progress.

@muppetpuppet I like this idea for a thread. Also I have always been intrigued by the development process and it seems like there is very little info about what actually goes into taking an idea and making a video game out of it. Do you think you could shed some light on the development process?

@PuppyToucher Well that's a big topic and it varies per developer. I can just shed light on our process.

It depends truly on the size of the production and if it's a funded development cycle or something we fund ourselves (we do a lot of work for hire so we can do that).

We are a 20 people studio that at the moment is doing a 2nd party game(its un-announced so can't talk about that) and a few independent games as well as work for a outside investor.

Idea wise, there's never a lack of good game idea's , the saying "ideas are cheap, execution is everything" really applies to game development, underwater exploration while fighting giant squid "awesome" , animal crossing with aliens meets viva pinata "great lets do that" you get the idea.

So what happens is either through game-jamming internally or something a developer makes in the off hours we end up with simple prototypes quite regularly . When one of these seems like it could be a good game we invest the time to create what's called a vertical slice, basically we iterate until we have a playable demo with a bit of art, a bit of interface , a few menus, a bit of story etc etc, a vertical slice of what the end product would be.

Here's a video of a prototype nearly at vertical slice stage :

(it's what got my post removed, but it seems relevant now. Its a pet project of mine,

We take this demo and start shopping it around to either investors, publishers or platform holders in the hopes they will fund the rest of the production.

Then we start the actual content push, mapping out the entire game, creating levels, story and whatnot.
Once that's done you get to release it, which is itself its own complicated process, for instance Nintendo has something called LotCheck which is basically a quality control they do, if you fail you can't release, if you succeed you get that magic Nintendo seal of quality on your game and you get to release.

the actual development is a mix of different methods, programmers will use SCRUMM to iterate in two week cycles on different parts of the products, where-as artist and concept artists will map out features and designs for parts of the game not yet being worked on by the programmers.

We do exclusively 3D games so we have what's called a pipeline to creating assets and the visuals for the game, this includes modelling 3D models in packages such as 3Dstudio Max, exporting that and adding our own visual style and shading on those inside a 3D engine. We use Unity3D which is a pretty popular 3D engine and one off the biggest brands, another one you're sure to have heard of is the Unreal Engine.

Imagine a 3D engine as a sort of authoring environment to create games, a virtual space where you can put your 3D models and attach the behaviors created by your programmers.

If you have kids, they might use Scratch or gamemaker to create simple programs and mini games when in school, Unity3D and Unreal really aren't that much different, just massively more powerful and sometimes complex.

nowadays we create multiplatform games, that means we create them once and with a few changes can run them on anything from an iPhone up to a playstation4. the only difference nowadays is actually the permissions you get to publish on a specific platform, (Sony and Nintendo don't allow just everybody to create games for their platform, they need to approve everything and control their platforms tightly)

well that's just a brief write up, plus I got a reason to show the switch game I'm working on.. yey

@muppetpuppet Not gonna lie that almost vertical slice you showed looks like the start of what could be a pretty dope game.

Thanks for the info about the development process. I guess I am still confused as to what all goes into making a game, but I probably will always be unless I sit down and try to make my own.

Not sure if you can talk about this or not but why does it seem like indie devs can have a tough time getting on the platform? Lots want to chalk it up to the game not being good, but using axiom verge as an example of a game that reviewed well, why would it be held up in being put on the switch?

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/03/axiom_verge_team_sti...

Or a situation like this one also

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2018/01/indie_dev_talks_abou...

Well it's not my place to comment on Nintendo's quality control. But I can safely say Nintendo has a legacy of great and stringent quality control. It's part off what makes Nintendo Nintendo, and it's the same level of quality for an indie as it is electronic arts, so yeah that's an investment and it can go wrong sometimes for small studios.

I'm not a huge fan of complaining about something you know before hand , and these articles seem to make it a bit more sensationalistic than necessary., These games had zero investment to Port to the switch, and their devs where asking permission before making the actual demo on the switch, I'd be more strict on those as well , as far as I'm concerned you don't waste people's time by showing them documents, you show them playable builds on their system and things will go a lot smoother.

Anyways it's Nintendo's prerogative to reject games, and it can suck, but it is also what makes Nintendo different from the race to the bottom that is for instance mobile games.