I don’t really know how many games were reviewed from GDC but I was told by another that only 3 or 4 were.
I do know, however, that among the games reviewed, 3 were mine: Barnyard Blast, Makeup Diva, and Housewife Superstar.
Be sure to get these games when they are released. Here is a bit of info on each.
Barnyard Blast was my original concept and design. That seems like a paradox to call it “original†given its likeness to Castlevania, but the game has changed a lot since its conception.
In fact I was originally borrowing ideas from Donkey Kong Country when designing the game. Castlevania stepped in due to memory constraints on the Nintendo DS hardware; we have a limited number of screens available in VRAM and when the player moves too far in the map we need to flush the current buffer and load the next. We borrowed Castlevania’s room-by-room design due to this limitation (originally planned to do the map in Super Mario Bros. fashion).
Later, the programmer next to me threw together a Castlevania whip as a joke and put it into the game. He is into Castlevania.
In fact I told him to remove it before the demo at GDC for fear that crossing too far into Castlevania territory would be taken as a bad thing, however he left the whip and it turned out that bearing so much likeness to Castlevania was a good thing.
After GDC we headed more into the parody direction, though the original parody style was simply coincidence.
Be sure to get the game and help Robert Belmart, his wife Julia Belmart, and their son Cliffy Belmart stop the evil darkness from spreading over Barnyard Town.
After finishing the story for Barnyard Blast I went on to two other games we had at GDC.
Makeup DivaHousewife SuperstarFor Makeup Diva, I am the game designer and research & development specialist.
To expand, the process of drawing onto 3-D models using the Nintendo DS stylus is not simple. Even if it was a normal 3-D game, the problem would be complex enough in requiring that we locate the polygon under the stylus on the screen and even further locate the texel on the texture there, using the UV coordinates from that polygon.
The math for this is nothing new, and some readers may feel that this problem is relatively simple.
However handling this problem on Nintendo DS is not as straight-forward.
The Nintendo DS standard 3-D formats (Nitro System for those who know what I mean) don’t actually have polygon data in them. When the file is created, the polygon data is compiled into a series of drawing commands the hardware uses to draw polygons more quickly. The series of commands required to draw the 3-D models has already been created and the hardware simply needs to run over them, allowing it faster drawing. This was the method on Nintendo 64 as well.
So without polygon data available, no “surfaces†for temporary drawing, and the generally unique nature of the Nintendo DS API, the problem was no simple matter.
The technology to draw onto 3-D models did not exist on Nintendo DS because of multiple hardware restrictions. My first job was to overcome these restrictions and create that technology, so when you play the game and draw onto the 3-D faces, you will be using the direct results of my research and development.
As the game designer, many of the challenges you face in the game will be of my design. I also pushed the game from 2-D (as shown in the screenshots in the links of the original concept) to 3-D.
For Housewife Superstar, I am also a designer.
This project has just gotten underway starting today, so not much has been done yet.
Be sure to pick up all of these games as they are released 8-10 months from now.
The most expensive game we plan to make should only be $29.99.
Also don’t be fooled by all the pink. Makeup Diva and Housewife Superstar are targeted towards males also, and the pink was merely a result of lack of time in preparing the posters for GDC. We have a Mad TV/Saturday Night Live style of comedy in these games and aren’t overplaying the feminine sides of the games, so males shouldn’t be pushed as far away as one might think from looking at the preliminary posters.
L. Spiro
