Comment by phoboslab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phoboslab | Hacker News Reader

I previously worked with the Nintendo Web Framework to bring one of my HTML5 games to the Wii U[1].

NWF itself is quite polished and very easy to work with. You get all the dev tools you know from Chrome – the debugger connects directly to the console. "Porting" my game was very straight forward for the most part.

However, the hardware setup was clunky. You're swapping out SD cards to install images with the system software and the account setup is really tedious.

The worst part was the whole paperwork you have to wade through. The game submission process is as manual as it gets. There's no nice web interface to tie it all together - instead you're writing emails, filling out PDFs and Excel Sheets(!). Hundreds of emails.

I can only hope that they improved the paperwork part. This was all about 2 years ago.

[1] http://phoboslab.org/log/2014/07/xtype-plus-an-html5-game-fo...

Having lived in Japan on and off for the past decade, this is just par for the course for a Japanese company. If you wanted to get anything done, it's done via fax. God knows why, that's just how it is. Everywhere.

edit: I'm referring specifically to the need for lots of paperwork

Was it worth the trouble?

Financially? Not really. I made about $30k from the game in total. It's a very simple game, though. Nothing you'd expect big sales numbers from.

I guess that depends on how quickly you made the game and how many games you could make like that. Would the paperwork be the same amount for your second game? If not, it sounds like it'd be worthwhile to try to churn out simple games this way in the evenings/weekends (think: flappy bird, 2048, etc) and make a decent profit on the side.

Did it take you less than about 8 full time months to make the game? If so you just made the median salary in the US for full time work.

I think the real question is whether he made more money than he would have otherwise in the same time, not where his earnings compare to the median employer.

Median salary in general is a meaningless comparison. You'd need to compare it to someone in their field.

Would WebGL games be compatible do you know?

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