FiSSION Update 16/06/09

PunMaster has released new info on FiSSION:

FiSSION is a homebrew 3D game engine being developed for the Nintendo Wii. Its goal is to allow homebrew developers the opportunity to develop studio-quality games without the massive upfront investment of writing a game engine to support their content.

FiSSION originally started out as “Hydra,” a project with similar goals but targeted at XNA on the Xbox 360, a little over a year ago. It was a two-person endeavor shared between myself and a like-minded friend, and we made a lot of progress in the first few months of development. Unfortunately, my friend eventually lost interest, and lack of any good project management system made it almost impossible for me to continue the project on my own. Then, after becoming interested in the Wii, and some encouragement from another friend, I decided to pick the idea back up, this time incarnated as project “FiSSION.” Although I am now coding it mainly on my own, I must give my friend some credit for keeping me motivated. It has since been only a few months, and, despite some trouble working with the Wii’s poorly documented software, the project is progressing at a surprisingly fast pace. With that said, I am proud to announce this first public demo release, which, if nothing else, at least proves that I have made my way into the Wii game development scene. All in all, I am really hoping for this project to turn into something relatively extraordinary, especially given that no console has really seen something like this before.

Some other developers have kindly asked me to mention that while I believe FiSSION is destined to be the first of its kind, there still are other projects out there for the Wii and other consoles with similar goals. Likewise, I excitedly encourage everyone in the Wii development scene to keep up the great work and share whatever you can to help others. If you have any questions about FiSSION, or anything you would like to share, I'd love to hear from you on the discussion page. Have fun. :)

Update 6/16/2009
Well, It's been almost exactly two months since I released something related to FiSSION, so here's another mouth-watering screenshot of 0xIDE, the game editor. This time it's complete with all-original content. Halo maps are finally gone for good. :) In the process of making the game editor, I have also developed a fairly robust system for game data management that should allow me to finally expand FiSSION from just a fancy model viewer to an actual game, with gravity, collision, weapons, and objectives. Just saying all that scares me a little, because it still sounds like such a daunting task. But I never thought I'd make it this far, so I'm confidant anything's possible.

Also, as you might suspect from the fairly developed-looking level open in the editor, there is also a real game for the FiSSION engine pretty far in development already. I've been completely silent about it up to this point, because I wasn't sure if it was really going anywhere. But it is starting to seem like a real possibility, so I thought I'd mention it. The game will be called "Sifer". It is a sci-fi shooter partially inspired by an anime called Denno Coil (if you have any interest in anime, I highly suggest looking into it). The game will be a single-player campaign with possible multiplayer support, depending on how things go. Because content creation is such a time consuming process, and it is unlikely I'd finish an entire game start-to-finish in a reasonable amount of time, I plan on releasing the game in a series of five episodes, each with about a half-hour of gameplay.

I won't give away much more than that right now, but as a little teaser, here are the titles for the five episodes I am planning.

Stage 1: Quantum Chaos Connection
Stage 2: The Neuron Exposition
Stage 3: Null and Void
Stage 4: Discontinuity
Stage 5: Guardians in Exile

Full details here --> http://wiibrew.org/wiki/FiSSION