Entering the Nintendo DS homebrew scene
By Erik van Kempen | August 11, 2007
Do you remember playing Mario on the NES? Well, I do. This summer I just wanted to play that game again, but because of the lack of a NES (or any other good console for that matter) I couldn't. I decided to buy Nintendo's newest handheld console, the Nintendo DS Lite, and the newest Mario game. So I am the proud owner of a great piece of Japanese hardware and software since a few days. After playing for a few hours I could already remember my adventures from way back.
Homebrew
One of the nice advantages of the Nintendo DS is that there's a great homebrew community, developing hundreds of nice applications and games. I've never programmed any games (except Conway's Game of Life, like every other geek) before, so I decided to give it a try.
Gorillas
But which game? During the hours of playing Mario I also remembered a game called Gorillas, which I played very often when I was just a little geek. Do you remember it? Two gorillas throwing bananas trying to hit each other. It is a turn-based artillery game in which the players needed to define the velocity and angle for every throw. This looked like the perfect game to develop for the NDS.
Modern version of Gorillas
I wanted to take the old Gorillas game to a new level, taking advantage of new technologies etcetera. I want to use the touch screen to determine the velocity and angle of the throw. The user needs to point on some sort of radar screen on which a vector will appear from the center of the radar screen to that point. The angle of the vector is the angle of the throw and the length determines the velocity. So the user actually determines the initial velocity vector of the throw. This is a lot better than typing the values of the velocity and angle numerically and maybe makes the game a bit harder (unless I decide to show the user the previously used vector, before he or she taps on the screen again). The images should look a bit less old too. So I said goodbye to the old 8-bit images of skyscrapers etcetera.
Programmers are bad graphical designers
Developing a game involves a lot of graphical design. I know very few (just a few) people, who are good programmers and and are able graphically design very well. So that's a bad thing for me. But I wanted to try this by myself first before I dare to ask one my designer friends for help. I came up with a few drawings in my sketchbook and tried to draw them digitally too. I've also used some CC or GPL licensed artwork, so don't mistake me for being a good designer ;-). Nevertheless, I'm fairly happy with the intermediate results. I even dared to post them to my blog.
Some mock-ups of my bad drawing skills
Programming
With these intermediate drawings I can start programming the game. I haven't started yet, because of a few problems with the devkitPro installation on my machine. But I will start soon and show the results to you all.
Update
I found another person that thought about the same thing. Unfortunately, this person had this brainwave a few moments earlier than I, so he already released a version which is quite good. He preserved the classic look of the original Gorillas and also made use of the touch screen. Personally I prefer my modern approach. That's why I will keep on going with this project. I think my version differs enough from his. Besides, I was not able to find any recent releases. The current version was created back in 2005. You can find his version here.
