A year ago today I released the homebrew Space Game for Wii U. Hard to believe how quickly time has gone by since then. It's been a busy year for the Wii U though! (even if it's just the Wii U)
I want to thank everyone in the community for helping make it (the scene) what it is today. There are some haters out there but at the end of the day there's a whole bunch of cool apps on wiiubru.com.
When Space Game was made, only very small and limited homebrew could be created using the PPC userland browser exploit by yellows8. The constraints were so high, that when I released Space Game, there were actually a few people who thought that it meant an IOSU exploit was out, simply because it had graphics.
By contrast, there is now permanently installable homebrew that can operate at almost every level of the system. And not only that, but it's very easy to setup directly on the Wii U using only the web browser!
That's quite a ways from where it was!
Specifically, I'd like to give a shout out and thank all the following people I've personally interacted with (not tagging anyone cause there's a lot):
pwsincd, brienj, rw-r-r_0644, quarktheawesome, dylon99, creepermario, ryuutseku85, maschell, fix94, dimok, kanye_west, aliaspider, _student, vinscool, eclipsesin, whovian9369, sans-serif
These guys have given me a lot to think about in conversations over the last year, and overall have helped me become a stronger developer through my interactions with them. As well as providing entertainment
I also would like to thank the following people, who while I don't really talk to, do seem to be very nice and influential either through indirect interactions or me benefitting from code of theirs:
datalogger, opendata, zarklord1, yellows8, smea, shinyquagsire, relys, marionumber1, nwplayer123, bullywiiplaza, masterwin, hexkyz, sonyusa, eliboa, mrrean, gudenau
To celebrate the 1-year-release of Space Game, I tried to rush out a few releases, but ultimately I wasn't able to finish in time... These are things I was working on and trying to finish for today:
I may abandon the 3DS port, as there are already plenty of homebrew shooters out there for 3DS. It is interesting though to see how moving between the two platforms isn't that bad at all. (The only other example I know that did this jezzballu (and well, possibly retroarch)).
As for the new Space Game features, I hope to get to them soon(tm!). The road map is here if anyone wants to contribute.
And speaking of things I want to do in the future, I really really really need to get the new version of HBAS out. It will have zip support, and it will finally be able to support apps that use extra files, such as Nuclear Space Kittens, Pazaak, or Retroarch cores. That issue is here, and it close to completion. If anyone wants to chip in there as well, it's appreciated. Much of the main work is done, all that remains is carefully handling upgrade/deletion.
Like I said, I really wanted this to be a release post for at least one of the four above bullets, not a blog post, but things didn't end up that way. Anyway that's all I have to say. This post ended up being longer than I thought it would.
I hope to see familiar faces in the Switch homebrew community when that starts to take off. And you can bet that porting Space Game to that platform is something I am very interested in.
Thanks again <-- (best smiley)
I want to thank everyone in the community for helping make it (the scene) what it is today. There are some haters out there but at the end of the day there's a whole bunch of cool apps on wiiubru.com.
When Space Game was made, only very small and limited homebrew could be created using the PPC userland browser exploit by yellows8. The constraints were so high, that when I released Space Game, there were actually a few people who thought that it meant an IOSU exploit was out, simply because it had graphics.
By contrast, there is now permanently installable homebrew that can operate at almost every level of the system. And not only that, but it's very easy to setup directly on the Wii U using only the web browser!
That's quite a ways from where it was!
Specifically, I'd like to give a shout out and thank all the following people I've personally interacted with (not tagging anyone cause there's a lot):
pwsincd, brienj, rw-r-r_0644, quarktheawesome, dylon99, creepermario, ryuutseku85, maschell, fix94, dimok, kanye_west, aliaspider, _student, vinscool, eclipsesin, whovian9369, sans-serif
These guys have given me a lot to think about in conversations over the last year, and overall have helped me become a stronger developer through my interactions with them. As well as providing entertainment
I also would like to thank the following people, who while I don't really talk to, do seem to be very nice and influential either through indirect interactions or me benefitting from code of theirs:
datalogger, opendata, zarklord1, yellows8, smea, shinyquagsire, relys, marionumber1, nwplayer123, bullywiiplaza, masterwin, hexkyz, sonyusa, eliboa, mrrean, gudenau
To celebrate the 1-year-release of Space Game, I tried to rush out a few releases, but ultimately I wasn't able to finish in time... These are things I was working on and trying to finish for today:
- PC Port (Java) - I made a preliminary PC port of the original Wii U code for Space Game. It's functional, but has a few issues. It can be downloaded here: https://github.com/vgmoose/JSpaceGame/releases
- Android Port - I was going to try to use JSpaceGame as a base for an Android port, but when I started work on this, it ran at a very low framerate. So I scrapped this.
- 3DS Port - I started to try to work on a 3DS port of Space Game using Pong as a base. I got the main gameplay working but there are some graphical and control glitches. In-development source code is here: https://github.com/vgmoose/space/tree/3ds/
- New Wii U Features - @Creepermario has been adding significant functionality to the Wii U version of Space Game that isn't yet released, and still isn't ready to be. That code is here: https://github.com/vgmoose/space/tree/wut_working
I may abandon the 3DS port, as there are already plenty of homebrew shooters out there for 3DS. It is interesting though to see how moving between the two platforms isn't that bad at all. (The only other example I know that did this jezzballu (and well, possibly retroarch)).
As for the new Space Game features, I hope to get to them soon(tm!). The road map is here if anyone wants to contribute.
And speaking of things I want to do in the future, I really really really need to get the new version of HBAS out. It will have zip support, and it will finally be able to support apps that use extra files, such as Nuclear Space Kittens, Pazaak, or Retroarch cores. That issue is here, and it close to completion. If anyone wants to chip in there as well, it's appreciated. Much of the main work is done, all that remains is carefully handling upgrade/deletion.
Like I said, I really wanted this to be a release post for at least one of the four above bullets, not a blog post, but things didn't end up that way.
Anyway that's all I have to say. This post ended up being longer than I thought it would.I hope to see familiar faces in the Switch homebrew community when that starts to take off. And you can bet that porting Space Game to that platform is something I am very interested in.
Thanks again
<-- (best smiley)
