Game System

[ProgrammingFreak]

I was wondering if there was any indies who have made games for a console platform or even thought about making their own gaming console

[soniCron]

One guy suggested making a console... (http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=4147) :D

[Anlino]

I saw an ad on Gamedev.net some days back about a console you built yourself, and coded your games directly in, but i don't remeber the name of it, neither the url(making this post rather pointless;) ). It's out there though, so with some googling, you should be able to find it.

[soniCron]

Are you talking about Andre LaMothe's XGameStation (http://www.xgamestation.com/)?

[digriz]

Some have for xbox live and xbox360 live, pompom and reflexive to name 2.

as a side note, there's a lot of information on the internet for doing homebrew gameboy stuff. But we tend not to cover things like that on this site.

Consoles development invariably involve lots of NDA's with the big boys like sony, microsoft etc and as such cannot be discussing in open forums. :)

But if you look around on the internet you'd be amazed at the information you can find.

[Anlino]

That's the one, thanks for the link!

[Jonas]

Yep there are a few of us around here on the Xbox 360 Live arcade.
So far its likely about the most approachable console for Indies.

Not sure if you meant to sell Console games, or to do homebrew stuff.

I would say there are costs that make it a bit less accessible than perhaps it could be. I can't really go into specifics due to said NDA ;) I will say you really need to be able to fund the title creation, testing, certification and probably loc costs OR find a company that will. (ie a publisher). I think some folks have handed off their project entirely to 3rd parties to even do the dev work changes, sure the pie gets pretty thin at that point, but it's an option.

I think from a development perspective that Xbox is likely a lot less different from Windows than say Playstation or Revolution. As you've seen in the articles about XNA(I'm still a little foggy on that one) and such, MS wants to lessen the work between their platforms which makes a ton of sense.

It's seemingly a lot more approachable than say Revolution or PS3 in dev work and probably in cost. It's nice that revolution will only be 2000 for the Kit, but the dev kit is just the beginning. It could be interesting to see what PS3 does with their download service, might open some more indie doors.

Anyway, I hope that helps a bit on the scope of some of the aspects of console work. Have a good one.

[Jim Buck]

I've made games for PS1, PS2, and PSP.. but that was when I had a job for a bigger company.