Dojin Soft: Homebrew In Japan. Will Pandora Enjoy It?


timofonic

GP Mafia
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Messages
399
Hello.


For those that don't know what Dojin Soft means, here's a text from Wikipedia...
QUOTE
Dōjin soft, 同人ソフト short for "software", also sometimes called dōjin games 同人ゲーム, are video games created by Japanese hobbyists or hobbyist groups (referred to as circles), more for fun than for profit; essentially, the Japanese equivalent of fangames. Most of them are based on pre-existing material, but some are entirely original creations. They are almost always exclusive to the PC, but a few notable exceptions also exist for the Dreamcast, because of its very weak copy protection.

(from Wikipedia)

As japanese stuff usually has distinctive differences from the occidental one and there's a common way of using own terms for their stuff, dojin soft term is used for japanese homebrew productions.

What about Pandora in Japan? Will there be a distributor for the land of the rising sun? What about promoting and sending Pandoras to japanese Dojin Soft groups by using bounties too?

Please consider it, there's a very interesting homebrew scene in Japan and that could benefit both occidental and japanese people by having a good machine running them without restrictions imposed by commercial handhelds and even more computing power for running them than most game handhelds.

Here's a very short list of Dokin Soft groups:

# Team Shanghai Alice: They are mostly known for the Touhou Project, a series of games (mostly manic shoot'em ups) developed mostly by only one man. The first game was released for pc9801.

# ABA Games (Kenta Cho): An one-man group that specializes in developing abstract looking shoot'em ups. Most of the games are Open Source and there are Linux ports available.

# Studio Pixel (Daisuke AMAYA): one-man group specialized in games with graphical retro style, making use of sprites and music of chiptune style. He released mostly games of platform genre, but there's a RPG in development. His games are in japanese, but Cave Story (action-adventure, similar in playability to Metroid and Castlevania so sometimes called by fans as Metroidvania) for example was translated to English by the Aeon Genesis (AGTP) translation group. Games are closed source, but he's open about porting it to other platforms likeLinux (download here, Mac, Xbox, GP2X, Nintendo DS (WIP but demo available) and PSP.



More info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dojin_soft
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Dojin_soft
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/44/12

Japanese Dojin Soft sites for future references:

http://doujinsoft.com
http://dojinsoft.sblo.jp

(This post will be improved in the following days with more information)
 
I thought I mentioned rrootage, but that was before we knew what we kind of power had, I think.

rrootage is open-source and Linux, so we just need someone to port it. The music rocks, the graphics are some of the better in open-source, and I want! :p
 
javaJake said:
I thought I mentioned rrootage, but that was before we knew what we kind of power had, I think.

rrootage is open-source and Linux, so we just need someone to port it. The music rocks, the graphics are some of the better in open-source, and I want! :p
I remember you mentioning rrootage before.
 
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rRootage and noiz2sa will almost certainly be ported to the Pandora.
Kenta Cho's later games however are programmed in D, which might be a problem to port to C or assemble a D compiler for ARM Linux (not sure if one exists).
 
AnonymousTipster said:
rRootage and noiz2sa will almost certainly be ported to the Pandora.
Kenta Cho's later games however are programmed in D, which might be a problem to port to C or assemble a D compiler for ARM Linux (not sure if one exists).
QUOTE
* DMD: the Digital Mars D compiler, the official D compiler by Walter Bright. The compiler front end is licensed under both the Artistic License and the GNU GPL; sources for the front end are distributed along with the compiler binaries. The compiler back end is proprietary.
* GDC: A front end for the GCC back end, built using the open DMD compiler sources. Development snapshots also support D version 2.0.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_%28programm...#Implementation

http://dgcc.sourceforge.net
 
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To the best of my knowledge, there are no Japanese indie game developers who frequent these forums. If you want these devs to bring their games to our new system, you need to ask them.
 
Chip said:
To the best of my knowledge, there are no Japanese indie game developers who frequent these forums. If you want these devs to bring their games to our new system, you need to ask them.
There's always the language barrier. I think it could be better to have a Japanese site about Pandora or find some japanese site about homebrew development.

It's worth it as they will discover a nice homebrew machine and we will enjoy their software :)

Hyperpc said:
This is great i loved cave story. maybe a nice one with improved graphics :p
I think your message is self contradicting. Cave Story is perfect as it is, it has a retro style and that's one of the reasons I like of the game. If you like the game so much, I don't understand why you want it "improved" (do you want ultra-realistic graphics or more resolution sprites? :p).

PD: Dreamcast rules! ;)
 
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You can always improve in the area of graphics for games like cave story. you could make them sharper and at a higher resolution. Making a game with better graphics does not mean making them more realistic that's an over generalization.
 
Cave Story at a higher resolution wouldn't be Cave Story. :(

Of course we all want the Japanese devs to work on Pandora. The question is, what can we reasonably do to make it happen?

Personally, I'd contribute some money to get Kenta Cho a P&|a, with no strings attached, simply because he makes awesome games. Maybe somebody could start a fund for things like this? It's a little early to be worrying about this, though.
 
I think Cho would be open to trying out stuff for the Pandora, as he seems to like programming for different platforms (Palm, Wonderswan, XNA), so maybe once the Pandora scene is starting to gain some momentum and publicity, someone should find out if he would consider it.
 
OrR said:
Cave Story at a higher resolution wouldn't be Cave Story. :(

Of course we all want the Japanese devs to work on Pandora. The question is, what can we reasonably do to make it happen?

Personally, I'd contribute some money to get Kenta Cho a P&|a, with no strings attached, simply because he makes awesome games. Maybe somebody could start a fund for things like this? It's a little early to be worrying about this, though.
One of the things is motivate their developers, another thing is informing japanese Dojin Soft communities about the Pandora system and the possibilities.

A Japanese Pandora community or an existing Pandora-friendly community could make the japanese homebrew community to get interest in this system. A Japanese site showing news about Pandora and it's homebrew is a must for having some possibility of sucessful, if not then Pandora will be totally unknown even in homebrew or indie development.

They must understand clearly the advantages of homebrew for Pandora against commercial systems like PSP and Nintendo DS and promote it specially in that way.
 
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Yay, these Japanese Guys really have Talent. I love Cave Story, superb Game for a "1-Man Production". And wasn't it a unknown Japanese Guy who gave us the Full-Speed CPS2 Emu for GP2X within a Month? :) Would be cool if every Emulator would grow that fast and that perfect. ^_^
Yes, we need Japanese Guys, Doujins are always good and I have many (Hentai) Doujins :lol:

I hope, the Comunication will be possible, Japanese People seems to have trouble with english...even more than I have. ^_^ Strange for a Country, where the young People are learning in School the whole day.
 
The only real way for learning English is going to a native country. Keep in mind their language is totally different than the occidental ones, like most Asian languages. The advantage of occidental countries is that our languages and culture are more the same, so it's easier to learn for them and understandable even is being quite inaccurate like mine.

But the problem is that that was an exception, I hope by some kind of motivation more Japanese users and developers appears to the homebrew scene.
 
Yrx said:
Why does software programmed by Japanese people have to have a different name? And are we assuming that the Japanese are inherently better programmers?



It's not me the one that uses a different name but the people. It is used also as a name for this different flavor, as their homebrew/indie scene is more active than usual and quite selled (specially visual novels).

Better developers? That's very relative, as programming is very accesible and there can be really good developers everywhere. What I like of Japanese developers is that they seems to do games with certain distinctive style.

What I'm sure is that there are more homebrew developers or at least they are more active because they can even sell their productions and get money from it.

I think we need someone to explain us about the Japanese homebrew/indie scene.

It could be interesting that communities from other asian countries know about Pandora and being friendly to the system, like gpain.com that is Corean.
 
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Hi,

Sorry for resurrecting an old thread ;)

I just found this about a tôhô project clone (Team Shanghai Alice) on Wii (Homebrew) :)

I wonder how easy it would be to port this game when released to GP2X or Pandora (PPC --> ARM)...

Bye, Magic Sam
 
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