Screw Nintendo
The recent WiiWare rejection was a setback that I hadn’t expected and had serious implications on the direction I needed to take the company for the future, so what to do? My first reaction could have been to give up and get depressed for a while but know what? Screw Nintendo! Nice as WiiWare would have been to get onto it isn’t the only platform out there. In reality XBLA is flooded with games and not really a strong target for the indie developer these days because of recent policy changes. PSN is possibly a very good platform for indies but I used to work on the PS1 dev-kit and if I know Sony their dev-kits still cost a fortune, so unless somebody from Sony kindly wants to loan me a dev-kit for the duration of the project it isn’t going to happen.
So where is Xiotex Studios going now? Obviously the only viable platforms left are PC, OSX and iPhone. This has however forced me to make a move that up until now I had resisted - translating my engine to OpenGL. It also means I have to reconsider the game I am making so that it would translate well to iPhone. To this end I cracked open XCode 3.0, downloaded SDL and have a working framework on OSX and not looking backwards. I must admit I was impressed how easy it was to get something up and running on the Mac using SDL but I am going to miss the friendly development environment of Visual Studio 2005 - and I know that I could code the game under that environment but coding on a Mac will stop all temptation to fall back to the comfort of DirectX.
