One Year of DS Programming

At 1st June 2009, I have completed my one year of DS programming. Just one year ago when I have joined at Kento Studios, my project manager told me that I had to work with ‘Nintendo DS’. Then I had asked him, “What?” He said again, “Nintendo DS” and stared at me. Perhaps my appearance expressed that I had not understood the word. Then he had written the word ‘Nintendo DS’ on a paper. He also said, this platform is completely new in Bangladesh and no one had worked with it still then in Bangladesh.
I, with my colleague, started to learn about the Nintendo DS, its features, what it was, how we could develop applications for it etc. searching at Google. We used to work hard so much, as we both are fresh graduates, our company was completely new with game development and the platform was also new in Bangladesh. All the new made troublesome for ours to work. Anyway, after studying hard, we found that the development resources are highly restricted and there was also a open source library named Palib for homebrew development. We had started to work with palib and said the authority to apply for license at warioworld for Nintendo DS game development. We had made an environment with devkitPro and palib and started to work. We studied various game logic, graphics, game development methodology and various terms related to game. We also implemented them at palib. We developed five demo games with palib. They are
* Abby Mathematicas
* Aymun & the Machon Pirates.
* 20.000 Leguas de Viaje Submarino
* Don Quijote.
* Olimpiadas del Sabar.
These were PC games and we made first level of these games for Nintendo and proposed the publisher to make all these games for Nintendo. It’s really pleasure to say that publisher was satisfied with our works though we were at very initial position of game development and gave the order to us for final production with original NitroSDK.
Meanwhile, we got the license from Nintendo as a developer and again started to study the new SDK and programming manuals. But we found that we had to work at very core level with assembly & C code. We worked hard continuously one month but we found that it would take longer time if we would go this way. We realized that we had to develop a development framework to speed up the development. We discussed it with authority. Company also realized it and managed a framework from Annino Games Inc. It also was not complete framework. We had started to work with it and filled up the lickings of it.
Anyway, the framework helped us more and we developed two games with it AbbyMathDS and OtijocsDS. Working at Kento Studios with Nitro makes us very confident that we can learn any new technology quickly and can work at any environment successfully.