Thorium Wars : interview

We got the chance to ask a few questions to the team behind Thorium Wars, a game recently released on the european DSiWare platform. We asked Ken, Matt, Florian and Ajani their feedback about the development of one of their latest games, finally available in Europe.

The Thorium Wars team members are:
Ken Patterson, President
Matt Heinzen, Lead Developer
Florian Jungwirth, Art Director
PN: Ajani Boganey, 3D Artist

PN: General comments say this is one of the best looking DSiWare to date, how much effort is it to actually develop a DLC title which looks like a real game?

Matt Heinzen: There is very little technical difference in developing a DS cartridge game and a DSiWare game. The main concern is dealing with the file size limit of 16 MBs, and ensuring that all textures and music fit within those limits. Because our previous DS retail titles used 16 MB cartridges, this was not a big problem for us.

Florian Jungwirth: From the artists point of view we have been working closely together with the programmers to make the environments and vehicles as interesting as possible, but also to make sure that we stay within DSiWare and memory limitations.

The Big John Games team

PN: How did you make your decision between a regular DS game and the finally chosen DSiWare?

Ken Patterson: Thorium Wars was originally created to be a DS cartridge game. Publishers were unsure of the market on the DS for a shooter like Thorium Wars and thus opted not publish the game as a cart. So we picked up the ball and published it ourselves on Nintendo DSiWare.

PN: Were there any limitations which caused you headaches by choosing to work on a DSiWare title rather than a DS card-based game?

Matt Heinzen: Not really. DSiWare actually made it easier to optimize the performance of the game because it was guaranteed to run on a DSi with a faster processor than the DS Lite. With a cartridge title running on a DS Lite there would have been occassional frame rate drops that do not occur on the DSi.