Homebrew Indie game devs and homebrew

karikatourea · Dec 14, 2019

Since a while now, me and a couple of friends are making pixel art games. Nothing big yet, but more than 10 or so small ones and we are steadily going bigger.

I think it would be pretty cool if we moved to switch eventually.

The indie community on nintendo seems better than ever and the dev kits are affordable. Still though, the fact that for 500 euros they basically "loan" you the dev kit, and if you are not productive enough they might ask for you to return it, or that they require a locked office with cameras inside and outside in order to give it to you, makes the gig a bit unhospitable.
I don't know how strict those rules still are, most threads I found are 2 years old, so maybe the situation has aged better.
But still, it makes you think that you might be better of with homebrew. I don't know if in order to publish them online we have to get a dev kit eventually, and also, my current exprerience with homebrew on switch is about zero. I run cfw on my 3ds and that's about it. I don't even own a switch yet, and the only thing about cfw I think I know is that it works only on certain serial numbers, I need to buy some stuff (jig and rcmloader, and...switch, in my case) and it's temporary. But it's easy to work out these details, if I knew this is the best course of action to take.

I think that the homebrew community is full of developers, and honestly I could really use some suggestions.
Thank you for your time.

Kafluke · Dec 14, 2019

Wrong forum. This is for exploits etc.

CompSciOrBust · Dec 15, 2019

It depends if you want to sell your game on the switch. If you don't care about selling it you might as well just release it as a homebrew game. It will be cheaper but the tools aren't as good (imo they're pretty good compared to other homebrew toolchains). If you want to sell the game you will need a development kit and a official sdk. Nintendo will make you sign a nda though and you will not be allowed to participate in the homebrew community anymore (although some people do anyway and I haven't heard of any lawsuits). If it was me I'd probably develop the game for pc and then contract a third party to port it and publish it on the switch so I could continue to be active in the homebrew scene.

FAST6191 · Dec 15, 2019

More or less what CompSciOrBust said, and I doubt anything will change with regards to the NDAs you have to sign likely meaning you technically can not contribute to homebrew, emulators* and more besides for possibly life. But I will note you can sell homebrew, plenty of people have done for many years now (GB/GBC famously has LSDJ, GBA saw things like Qwak, meteo and the bookreader, and any number of devs took donations for early work, took donations in general, ran ads on their sites for said homebrew... all things that you don't want to have done if you find yourself in front of the beak explaining your actions). There is no law against such things, at worst I have not seen the main Switch homebrew dev kit and what their software is licensed under (most dev kits and libraries are pretty permissive here and do things like BSD and LGPL for precisely this reason -- you might have to credit them for something and that is about it) and if they are not permissive to such things then you get to replicate those libraries for your final commercial effort instead.

Your audience however is only those people with modded consoles, and not usually that much inclination to pay for things (though this might have changed and I see any number of devs of emulators, homebrew and more supported with monthly/goal level chip in funds, here's a demo so get us over the line and have the whole thing type deals, donator secret rewards, and there are likely other options beyond those too besides the traditional sell a virtual license or make a donation).

*the authors of dolphin (the gamecube and nowadays wii emulator) have said they have had to ban people that came in offering to help and mentioned that they had read the leaked SDK lest it contaminate their source code. Now while modern SDKs have rather less than the GC (which in turn has rather less than the megadrive one I once saw) there is probably still enough to trouble you here. I would say the dolphin devs were being overly cautious if their would be opponent is most companies, but Nintendo do have a history (and a present) here so eh. That said we have had official devs come here asking about flash carts ($500 is insanely low compared to what things once were) and the like, and if you went looking hard enough there are plenty of others that float between homebrew and official code but don't make it too blatant.
Plenty of GBA and DS homebrew devs also did very well for themselves with the rise of IOS and then android.
Homebrew code has made its way into commercial things as well, it is usually emulator authors that get tapped when someone wants to make a commercial emulator bundle (pocketnes had an extremely permissive license and ended up in a commercial game, and I believe one of the DS megadrive emu authors also found themselves a commercial contract) but there are also people that do audio and video libraries.

newo · Dec 17, 2019

Well it is as I always say; nothing tried nothing done. I just saw a switch hb called "asteroids yo" that is free. But if you want to go official you already know where you need to contact. If you want to go back a couple generations there is even my personal favourite wiibrew

Homebrew Indie game devs and homebrew

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