tech art budgets for wii

Hey yall,

So, how complex can assets be for Wii titles?

This isn’t just a technical niggle - this is the basis of a business decision for many small developers.

If you’re considering porting your Unity game to Wii, one of the key questions is “how much work will I have to do to my artwork to make it work on the Wii”?

As we all know, a great deal of game development costs depend on assets (3d models, textures, animations).

This question should be answered BEFORE getting your Nintendo development kit. Yet I can’t find much public info. However, I’ve found this with a little digging:

This flying game art has some tech budgets in the images.

  • One airplane model uses 1000 polygon, 1024x1024 color map

  • for the buildings on the ground: “Each building is approximately 1000 triangles. The rubble bases at the bottom were created to be interchangable between buildings with the same footprint. I art-directed the concept artist and then modeled and UVed the assets pictured before passing them to a texture artist. Once the texture work was completed, I art teched the assets for use with the game engine. I then placed the buildings using Factor 5’s proprietary level design tool.”

Also, a little discussion of Wii shaders and lighting is here: http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=65787

Graphics chip details are interesting, but a little far removed from asset production budgets. Too much depends on code.

ANyone else have some tidbits like this, please post, and/or point me to them. I’d be very interested to see details about shaders and lighting, texture memory implementations, etc.

Answers on Wiis technical capability can not be answered in the public, nor can any licensee answer them to you as you are no licensee.

best chances are that you contact UT on the topic, perhaps they are in the position to share informations on anything with you.

Thanks for the reply.

I’m seeking to gather publicly available information,

I want to give general guidelines to game art students for authoring for Wii. I’m not planning to build a Wii game right now.

Obviously, I’m not asking people to post legally protected secret info.

There are sources of public info on Wii, as my examples show. It’s just a matter of gathering them up in one handy spot.

Personal opinions are not bound by NDAs. e.g. “I’ve built a few Wii titles and in my opinion about N,000 polygons is good in a typical Wii FPS character.”

Game players could contribute too. “I’ve never seen real-time shadows on any Wii title.”

However, perhaps this info is better listed in Wikipedia since it’s not Unity specific.

Anyway, thanks again for reading!