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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Anonymous Dev documents Wii U experience

snyps on 12 January 2014

"The story of what happened next is pretty well documented in the gaming press, but I'd like to highlight some interesting points that have been on my mind recently. Firstly, third-party support. Do you remember all the hype surrounding the Wii U launch? All those third parties showing videos of existing games that they were going to bring to the Wii U? Whatever happened to a lot of those games?"

What games is he/she talking about? Was it an ea game? cus then it doesn't matter. Ea is hella shady.



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snyps on 12 January 2014
walsufnir said:
snyps said:
Anybody could have picked out the nuances that peeved them and made a big deal about them.. The linker took long to load, the online was finished at the end.  The debugger was a pain.  Japanese translators.. Sounds like complaining.   Some ppl do good work with a launch kit, others blame anonymously.    


Who says they didn't do good work? But it's the tools that prevented perhaps more of a good work. And this applies to all devs if BigN ships the same software to every studio.


It sounds a little to me like a guy making excuses for not being happy with himself.  But i'm just pulling it out of thin air.  It sound like me in operatingsystems class and compiler design.  My teachers were a pain and didn't help much.  The tools we used were not well understood.  Our deadlines were short and expectations high.  I did a good job and passed but i sure bitched!  I blamed everything i could for making it difficult.  A lot of us did.  But there were ppl that did it easily..

And don't forget the tools have surely improved since launch.. strange he left that out don't you think?



walsufnir on 12 January 2014
snyps said:
walsufnir said:
snyps said:
Anybody could have picked out the nuances that peeved them and made a big deal about them.. The linker took long to load, the online was finished at the end.  The debugger was a pain.  Japanese translators.. Sounds like complaining.   Some ppl do good work with a launch kit, others blame anonymously.    


Who says they didn't do good work? But it's the tools that prevented perhaps more of a good work. And this applies to all devs if BigN ships the same software to every studio.


It sounds a little to me like a guy making excuses for not being happy with himself.  But i'm just pulling it out of thin air.  It sound like me in operatingsystems class and compiler design.  My teachers were a pain and didn't help much.  The tools we used were not well understood.  Our deadlines were short and expectations high.  I did a good job and passed but i sure bitched!  I blamed everything i could for making it difficult.  A lot of us did.  But there were ppl that did it easily..

And don't forget the tools have surely improved since launch.. strange he left that out don't you think?


Compiler desing was quite easy to me, too, but whatever.

He described the situation where it all started and made clear the situation it was at the beginning with all the different dev-kits and all the stuff. Of course stuff improves but who knows if he still has to code for the system.



Purple on 12 January 2014
supernihilist said:


i see thst and...voila

http://nintendoenthusiast.com/news/harder-develop-games-wii-u-case-says-renegade-kid/

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Developing-for-Nintendo-Wii-U-Is-Surprisingly-Easy-Developer-Says-288608.shtml

http://n4g.com/news/1307326/miyamoto-wii-u-is-even-easier-than-previous-consoles-to-develop-for

 

Many devs have said that the difficulties of WIiU are the ways and extra work and money required to implement the Gamepad, Miiverse etc. features. Nothing to do with the HW itself ....well yeah but not the chipset

I can't see how any of that negates what the anonymus dev stated and proves the Wii U is cheap and easy to develop for. Miyamoto saying how easy the system to develop for is particularly hilarious considering the chaotic state of EAD transitioning to Wii U development. Renegade Kid is just an indie that predominantly makes 3DS games. And if you read that Sumo article, it's PR for the game from the Official Nintendo Magazine (so it's obviously going to be a positive outlook) and just says that the Wii U can "adequately" manage PS360 graphics. At no point does he actually say "development is suprisingly easy", that's just the author paraphasing his comment that "there haven't been any big challenges" (which again, they're not going to admit to as it would put off potential buyers).  Hardly a glowing appraisal of the ease of development.

If the system was easy to develop for Nintendo wouldn't be constantly delaying its own games. If the system was cheap and easy to port games to, third parties would be releasing games for it.



Purple on 12 January 2014
snyps said:

And don't forget the tools have surely improved since launch.. strange he left that out don't you think?


Not strange at all. The game was too difficult and costly to port so the publisher decided to abandon Wii U development. It says that in the article.



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supernihilist on 12 January 2014
Purple said:
supernihilist said:


i see thst and...voila

http://nintendoenthusiast.com/news/harder-develop-games-wii-u-case-says-renegade-kid/

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Developing-for-Nintendo-Wii-U-Is-Surprisingly-Easy-Developer-Says-288608.shtml

http://n4g.com/news/1307326/miyamoto-wii-u-is-even-easier-than-previous-consoles-to-develop-for

 

Many devs have said that the difficulties of WIiU are the ways and extra work and money required to implement the Gamepad, Miiverse etc. features. Nothing to do with the HW itself ....well yeah but not the chipset

I can't see how any of that negates what the anonymus dev stated and proves the Wii U is cheap and easy to develop for. Miyamoto saying how easy the system to develop for is particularly hilarious considering the chaotic state of EAD transitioning to Wii U development. Renegade Kid is just an indie that predominantly makes 3DS games. And if you read that Sumo article, it's PR for the game from the Official Nintendo Magazine (so it's obviously going to be a positive outlook) and just says that the Wii U can "adequately" manage PS360 graphics. At no point does he actually say "development is suprisingly easy", that's just the author paraphasing his comment that "there haven't been any big challenges" (which again, they're not going to admit to as it would put off potential buyers).  Hardly a glowing appraisal of the ease of development.

If the system was easy to develop for Nintendo wouldn't be constantly delaying its own games. If the system was cheap and easy to port games to, third parties would be releasing games for it.



curl-6 on 12 January 2014
walsufnir said:
curl-6 said:
czecherychestnut said:

The only other thing I noted is that there seems a contradiction in the arguments of some Ninty fans on here, in regard to porting X360/PS3 games to the Wii U and the cost of porting. When a dev either says a Wii U game wasn't profitable or a game won't be ported to Wii U, the common argument is that porting to the Wii U is cheap (~$1 mil is usually quoted, a very skewed interpretation of a Ubisoft quote) and therefore a game either not profiting or not coming to Wii U is some conspiracy of 3rd parties to screw Nintendo. But if a game comes out that either runs as well or worse than X360/PS3 equivalent, its a lazy port from a lazy developer. The contradiction lies in the fact that if a game can't be easily compiled to Wii U from a X360/PS3 codebase and run well, then its not going to be cheap to do that port as a significant amount of recoding and re-optimising will have to occur.

Criterion have said it was very easy to upgrade the Wii U version of Need for Speed to use PC level textures. If other devs fail to do this, they're clearly lazy.


Well, it totally depends on the existing code and engine, I guess. Code doesn't equal other code in any way. If your code automatically "pleases" the Wii U architecture cpu-wise then of course you can easily utilize the better GPU it has.

It's more a matter of RAM; Wii U has over twice as much available for games.



snyps on 12 January 2014
Purple said:
snyps said:

And don't forget the tools have surely improved since launch.. strange he left that out don't you think?


Not strange at all. The game was too difficult and costly to port so the publisher decided to abandon Wii U development. It says that in the article.


it does not say that in the article. actually, he said he completed his project and he didn't know if he'd work on Wii U again.  Sounds to me like he didn't want to do it before he put his hands on it.  It's very self fulfilling.



walsufnir on 12 January 2014
curl-6 said:
walsufnir said:
curl-6 said:
czecherychestnut said:

The only other thing I noted is that there seems a contradiction in the arguments of some Ninty fans on here, in regard to porting X360/PS3 games to the Wii U and the cost of porting. When a dev either says a Wii U game wasn't profitable or a game won't be ported to Wii U, the common argument is that porting to the Wii U is cheap (~$1 mil is usually quoted, a very skewed interpretation of a Ubisoft quote) and therefore a game either not profiting or not coming to Wii U is some conspiracy of 3rd parties to screw Nintendo. But if a game comes out that either runs as well or worse than X360/PS3 equivalent, its a lazy port from a lazy developer. The contradiction lies in the fact that if a game can't be easily compiled to Wii U from a X360/PS3 codebase and run well, then its not going to be cheap to do that port as a significant amount of recoding and re-optimising will have to occur.

Criterion have said it was very easy to upgrade the Wii U version of Need for Speed to use PC level textures. If other devs fail to do this, they're clearly lazy.


Well, it totally depends on the existing code and engine, I guess. Code doesn't equal other code in any way. If your code automatically "pleases" the Wii U architecture cpu-wise then of course you can easily utilize the better GPU it has.

It's more a matter of RAM; Wii U has over twice as much available for games.


This, too, but this goes hand in hand with the better gpu, of course.



snyps on 12 January 2014
walsufnir said:
snyps said:
walsufnir said:
snyps said:
Anybody could have picked out the nuances that peeved them and made a big deal about them.. The linker took long to load, the online was finished at the end.  The debugger was a pain.  Japanese translators.. Sounds like complaining.   Some ppl do good work with a launch kit, others blame anonymously.    


Who says they didn't do good work? But it's the tools that prevented perhaps more of a good work. And this applies to all devs if BigN ships the same software to every studio.


It sounds a little to me like a guy making excuses for not being happy with himself.  But i'm just pulling it out of thin air.  It sound like me in operatingsystems class and compiler design.  My teachers were a pain and didn't help much.  The tools we used were not well understood.  Our deadlines were short and expectations high.  I did a good job and passed but i sure bitched!  I blamed everything i could for making it difficult.  A lot of us did.  But there were ppl that did it easily..

And don't forget the tools have surely improved since launch.. strange he left that out don't you think?


Compiler desing was quite easy to me, too, but whatever.

He described the situation where it all started and made clear the situation it was at the beginning with all the different dev-kits and all the stuff. Of course stuff improves but who knows if he still has to code for the system.


Did you do lex & yacc? I had to make an espresso compiler (subset of java).  including code optimization.