Enter the Nintendo DS.

We had initially looked at possibly moving one of the cell phone titles over to the GBA, but it didn't look like the market would support it, and technically it would have only turned out somewhere in between the low end and high end cell phone versions. With the success of DS, and a suspicion that the players might be a little more open to new third party titles, EA decided that they would support developing a really enhanced version of Orcs&Elves for the DS. This is going a bit out on a limb -- most successful Game Boy / DS titles have been either first-party Nintendo titles, or titles with a strong movie / toy / history tie in. While Orcs&Elves is doing well on mobile, it is still very far from a recognized brand.

The resource limits on the DS make it almost perfect for a small team development. The hardware is fun to work with, you can directly poke at all the registers, the tool chain works well, and the built in limitations of cartridge memory keeps the design decisions fairly straightforward. Going one step farther up to the PSP with a UMD brings you into the realm of large media sizes that can rapidly consume multi-million dollar development budgets.

Once the decision was made to go for it, it was my job to figure out what we could reasonably hope to accomplish on the platform, and bring up a first cut at the 3D rendering engine.

Up next: all the technical details

Look for another developer diary from John Carmack next week.