Developers News, Developers Features

A bit snappier than Brownie Brown?

Brownie Brown, a development studio funded and owned by Nintendo has confirmed that it's undergoing a change in its internal structure; this will involve the company restarting and being named 1-UP Studio. The team's work is often characterised as offering support and collaborative effort on major projects,...

Is Nintendo finally entering the digital age?

Earlier this year, we interviewed Trent Oster of Beamdog Studios, who had infamously claimed he would never develop titles for Nintendo again after the issues he came across when using Nintendo's WiiWare service. Since then, Nintendo has improved its gaming download facilities via the 3DS eShop, which...

Brandon Cobb explains why retro gaming matters

When we published a news article about a new SNES title on the way in 2013, Nightmare Busters, it attracted a great deal of interest. While many of us spend the majority of our game-time on current-day consoles, there still seems to be an appetite for retro titles and platforms. Few companies represent...

What did they make of Nintendo?

Japanese website 4Gamer (via Andriasang) recently asked a huge selection of Japanese developers about their best moments of 2011, and what they look forward to in the coming year. Predictably the 3DS featured heavily, with Platinum Games producer Atsushi Inaba calling the console "a revolution in...

Interesting statistics ahead

2D Boy is responsible for World of Goo, one of the best games WiiWare has to offer. The studio's Ron Carmel recently conducted a survey of around 200 independent developers, asking which formats the teams had supported and planned to continue working on in future. Sadly, Nintendo consoles sit right at the bottom. The...

Who doesn't?

We reported recently that Retro Studios thinks like Nintendo, so it shouldn't be any surprise that Nintendo is keen to find more developers on the same wavelength. Speaking to Edge magazine, Nintendo's US liaison Kensuke Tanabe stressed the importance of fostering stronger relationships with Western developers, in addition to Nintendo's world-renowned Japanese teams: I work with other..

Loves them really

There was something of a storm in a teacup around Reggie Fils-Aime's recent comments that Nintendo isn't interested in garage developers. As long-time fans of WiiWare and DSiWare will know, some of the services' better titles have originated from semi-professional coders or small development teams. Now Nintendo of America's director of PR Marc Franklin has stepped in to explain..

Only wants proper indies, thanks

Whether or not Nintendo has nothing to fear from mobile games, or whether Nintendo President Satoru Iwata's comments about low value games were accurate, the debate about Nintendo's relationship with small game developers is ripe for analysis. What's the company's official stance the matter, though? Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime clarified in an..

But what are they?

Previously known as Kuju London, Headstrong was responsible for bringing Battalion Wars 2 and House of the Dead: Overkill to Wii, and is currently working on Lord of the Rings: Aragorn's Quest, but the studio's looking to cast its development net wider with three titles in the works for 3DS. Steve Pritchard, Headstrong's Development Director, confirmed to German site 10do.de that..

Dementium developer thinks new machine could reignite third parties

When it comes to creating superb DS-exclusive titles, nobody rivals Nintendo: we know this, you know this and developers certainly know this, resulting in a marked decrease in DS boxed releases as publishers look to distribute their funds elsewhere. Jools Watsham, founder of...

Miyamoto rumoured to plan purchase of monocle, cane

Up from last year's runner-up ranking on the Develop 100 list of the most successful game developers, Nintendo this year took the top spot while former titleholder Blizzard Entertainment plummeted to number 80. The current champ's most profitable release this past year was Wii Fit. Eating the big N's pixellated dust are the rest of the top ten..

Even more microgames to download!

It seems fans will not be the only ones to get in on creating their own micrograms using Nintendo's upcoming WarioWare D.I.Y. release on Nintendo DS. Nintendo has just announced that some big name video game developers are getting involved and creating some brand new microgames that fans with a wireless broadband connection will be able to download and play. You..

A real horror story

The studio behind Cursed Mountain has been shut down by parent company Koch Media. The game was Deep Silver Vienna's first piece of Wii software and is one of the few third-party titles that was backed by a healthy television advertisement campaign but, although there are no hard sales figures to go on, it is generally regarded that the game sold poorly. Koch Media have not..

If your title is in direct competition with a Nintendo one, you may be screwed

If you like to moan about the apparent lack of quality titles coming to the Virtual Console then you may wish to direct your anger at Nintendo itself rather than third party publishers, if this recent piece of news is anything to go by. A poster on NTSC-UK forum has replied to a thread about the upcoming release of Super..

Big John Games talk Thorium Wars.

Earlier this month we saw the release of Thorium Wars on DSiWare. The game was a pleasant (and unexpected) surprise, and we recommend it highly. Needless to say, we were excited by the opportunity to have a few questions answered by the developers. Read on for insight into the retail version that never was, the unfortunate catch-22 of touch-screen control, and..

Australian studio Transmission Games makes unfortunate lay-offs

Despite the sales success of Ashes Cricket 2009 - and the enormous number of emails we receive about it here at Nintendo Life - the game's original developer Transmission Games (the Wii version was ported by UK-based Gusto Games) has just had to let go a third of its staff due to another potential project falling through. It's..

Also states that Nintendo's service needs demos and user ratings

Speaking at the Digital Distribution Summit in Melbourne, Australia, Fuzbi's David Edery has touched upon the problems facing Nintendo's WiiWare service, as well as discussing the issues that affect all three of the major digital download services - Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and WiiWare. Edery - who used to be XBLA..

Hi, I’m Christophe Pic, Lead Game Designer on Rabbids Go Home and I’m here to talk to you about the gameplay.

As usual, the Rabbids have an infallible plan: heap up all the stuff they can collect onto a giant PILE and climb up to the moon. Time for adventure! The Rabbids leave the junkyard pushing a souped-up shopping cart, and head for the land of human consumerism via the sewers to collect..

Hi everyone! This post is the pilot episode in a series of portraits of the characters in Rabbids Go Home.

So to kick things off, here’s a Human. The Human is what you can see in the image above. He’s also the one on the left in the image below. The Human is the one who, after a day’s work, goes and buys a load of useless stuff, just for the pleasure of buying stuff. Basically, the Human is..