Hurray for small wonders, I managed to get everything but one or two minor issues ready for our first submission to Nintendo. As a gamer, no doubt you've become aware over the years that making the game itself is a long and difficult process, requiring a tremendous amount of time investment by fairly talented people. Most gamers have no idea how much effort is demanded by console manufacturers to support robust error handling and maintain standards across all their titles. Just getting all the quirky details into Bruiser & Scratch that Nintendo expects has taken us about two weeks (we're a small team, so maybe it's less of a burden for bigger studios). Microsoft and Sony both have their docket full of requirements, each of which are substantial, so this is not a slight on Nintendo. It's just the nature of the beast.
What few gamers (and a surprisingly few game developers) realize is that there are a number of hoops to jump through as a publisher too. And I'm not even talking about releasing for packaged retail channels. Each territory has its own content ratings boards. ESRB handles ratings for North America, whereas in Europe, there are three different ratings boards, one for Australia, and one for Japan. Each one has a totally different process, papers to sign, fees to pay, and so forth. As a first-time publisher, this is a mountain of legal forms to become familiar with before our game can even be accepted by Nintendo for consideration. These ratings boards serve an important purpose--to make certain that people can purchase games with a standard rating that tells them clearly whether the content is appropriate for children of different ages.
I expect Bruiser & Scratch will sail through the process without any trouble, but we still have to go through the same steps as every other game to get our rating.
Current memory footprint: 51.5mb. We shrunk down a splash screen and saved a meg. Our last two sound effects are going in tomorrow morning; then we attack the texture sizes!
