DISCLAIMER: When reading this post, you may notice I used the word "however" quite excessively. I like that word.

Yesterday I bought the much-anticipated (and much-delayed) Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People and beat it in about three hours. This doesn't include finding all of the Teen Girl Squad cards or the Snake Boxer 5 manual pages, but it does mean that I beat the game while finding some of the extras along the way in quite a short amount of time in terms of gameplay. And since the gameplay length is entirely dependent upon how long it takes you to figure out the puzzles, I bet it would take less than an hour to beat if one were to play it all the way through knowing all the puzzles and skipping through the dialogue.

What does this mean? It means my main obstacle developing for the Nintendo DS is not a factor for WiiWare. Readers of my past news posts will know that I have been making a homebrew game for the DS that I had hoped to get published by an independent game publishing company such as O3 Entertainment once done. However, professional video games one finds in stores are different from casual online games. Store-bought games are expected to last several hours or the player will feel cheated. I've never made a game that would take a very long time to complete, so motivating myself to work on a lengthy project was rather daunting.

However, it's different with WiiWare, where you can make ephemeral titles for low, low prices. Defend Your Castle is a perfect example of a title that's simple as the dickens, costs only five dollars, and made it as a launch title for WiiWare. I'd really have preferred to make a Wii title from the beginning, as you can do a lot more with the Wii's hardware. However, at the time I started with homebrew, the Wii had not been successfully cracked yet.

I looked again yesterday, however, and the Wii homebrew community has 'sploded. Executing homebrew applications on an unmodded Wii is now possible for anyone who has Twilight Princess, an SD card, and a computer that can read/write to an SD card. Oh yeah, and you need a Wii. I have all of those things, and was able to get some homebrew games up and running rather quickly. I even made a quick, simple application myself in a couple of minutes (using a template, of course) and got it up without a problem.

Therefore, I am now directing my game developing attention to WiiWare. Since I'm already familiar with the C++ necessary for making computer and DS games, Wii development shouldn't be THAT difficult... right? Plus I can do all kinds of great stuff with the Wii that DS homebrew can't do. For example, cutscenes. The DS libs I was using can't integrate movie files directly into the .NDS, but with the Wii, that's not a problem! And, of course, there's the improved graphics capabilities.

Anyone reading this message who has the necessary equipment will probably be able to play a simple Wii game I've made by the end of the month. Once I'm comfortable with the Wii libraries, I intend to start working on Nicholas' Wiird Adventure, a game similar in style and length to Nicholas' Weird Adventure 2. Of course, it'll have improved graphics and take advantage of the Wii's unique capabilities in some way. Plus I intend to add some mini-games to give it some longevity after the initial game's over. When the game is finished, I intend to pitch it to some game publishing studios and try to get it published as an official low priced WiiWare title. If I can't get it published that way, I suppose I'll just release it as freeware. And no, I'm not abandoning the DS title, but I never got past making the initial engine anyway and I feel that I should wait to make it until I've made some shorter console games.

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Now, on to Enthalpy. Progress is coming along rather nicely on the first episode, though I don't expect it to be finished before 2009. The first one has some really elaborate 3D scenes and an aerial combat sequence that I hope to get looking as professional as possible. So far, I'm confident that it looks better than anything I've previously made.
I'd like to ask you (that's right! YOU, not any of the other people reading this post!) something about Enthalpy. I've wanted to do some kind of idiosyncratic episode naming for the series. In other words, every episode's title has something relating it to the other titles. For example, early episodes of The Drew Carey Show were all sciency ("The Joining of Two Unlike Elements is a Mixture", "Nature Abhors a Vacuum"), though this stopped with the episode "Science Names Suck". Every episode of Futurama (and most of The Simpsons) has a pun for a title. Every episode of Cowboy Bebop has a musical title. Every episode of Welcome to the NHK has a title of "Welcome to the ____".

I wanted Enthalpy to have some sort of idiosyncratic naming convention, but I'm having a hard time with it. My idea was to have every episode be a portmanteau; for example, the second episode will feature Sea-Monkey type creatures called Shrimpanzees (or Shrimpanions; I haven't decided which yet), and that will work quite well as a portmantitle. Another episode somewhere down the line will feature a Battle Bots parody called "Bot Battles", or "Bottles" for short. However, certain titles aren't that easy to make portmanteaus with. For example, the first episode involves a parody of a certain well-known rabbit dentist. The easiest title would be "Bright Smiles", which I could combine into... "Briles"? Furthermore, somewhere down the line, I have a plot for an episode I'm really looking forward to making that centers around Pokémon. "Pokémon" is already a portmanteau of "Pocket Monsters", so I'm set there, but I'd also really like to use "Zbtb7" as the title (for obvious reasons).

Does anyone have a good idea for an idiosyncratic naming convention Enthalpy can use that will support all these ideas?

Aaand that's it for this post. I look forward to stuff.