What is involved with console development?

I'd like to put my game onto consoles. I know that Unity already works with PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii U. (And I suspect PS4 and XB1 isn't too far away.) But what really is involved in producing a Unity title for one of those systems?

I am putting together a Kickstarter campaign to fund my game. Having a stretch goal of console versions sounds like a pretty good idea idea. But to know what kind of funding I'd need for that goal, I'd need to know what is involved.

I know a little bit about getting a dev kit for the console; it basically boils down to submitting a request from the company involved. All I really need for that is to be a legitimate company and to show enough product to prove my company knows what they are doing. (At least that's about all that Sony requires; if there is more than that for the others then please correct me.)

But what is is required once I have the console dev kit? My understanding is that Unity is already built ready to go, so I would *assume* that it's only going to take a day or two to configure my settings. I don't really need to budget for a lot of extra work, it should be already to go.

Oh right, and there are a few other requirements to get my final game approved by the companies themselves. Pass some testing, meet some quality standards, have trophies/achievements, and so forth. Quite honestly that's stuff that a game should be doing anyway, but again, correct me if I'm wrong.

So altogether, I see nothing that I really need to account for in order to put my unity game onto a console. I would suspect that Unity takes the guesswork out and makes it easy. But I don't really know for sure, and that's why I'm asking:
What is involved with putting my Unity game onto a console?

 

From my understanding entry restrictions and costs costs have gone down a lot, but legend has it that a single Xbox live patch costs $40,000. Consider how many games have zero day patches (75%+)...

I wouldn't so easily fob off the difficulty of actually getting the game certified either, I mean I have no idea of the scope of your project, but if you aren't putting it in front of paid QA people for long amounts of time, its quite possible it will get rejected.

Not to mention all the updates that will need to be done to optimise for console (UX, performance, controls, etc).

Maybe worry about stretch goals after you have your first 50k or so.

 

you have to get approved as a developer too.

Stretch goals for consoles when you have no development history in it would be a mistake and something you will struggle to meet.

Most kickstarters in gaming fail nowadays so I agree with the worry about stretch if you get anyone interested.

 

XB1 dev is free for the most part. Free Dev kits(2x), free Unity Pro.

 

I strongly suggest making a cross platform PC/mobile game if this is your assumption, or even just developing a mobile game from a PC, to get a taste of the kind of things that it's unreasonable to expect Unity to just handle for you. Unity is great at cross platform stuff, but that doesn't mean that it's magic.

 

What changes? Like say I make a android game for Ouya is it safe to assume it will run fine on a Wii-U, Xb1 or PS3? Obviously I'd need to change controls and stuff like that.

 

What I do when I have a plan for multiplatform:

Programming:
1.A generic input system which support all know input types
2.A hawk eye for every method I declare and make sure it is optimized. I watch over how much I am reading from(writing to) and how much I am allocating. How better I give pressure to stack/heap. this could help. With some special specification of console(edram for xb1), something might have to be changed. It would be good if someone shades some lights over here.
3.When developing shaders, I had a series of fallbacks to make sure, it at least run. Something is good in vertex shader, something is good in fragment shader. You might want to have a look on xenos-rsx specification, to see their limitations. Just think as if all of your code will run for every vertex/fragment. How much vertex/fragment processor do I have, what is their bandwidth and other things. You will get a general vague idea of what could turn evil or good.
4.Sometime we have low amount of memory(but insanely faster), for example ps3. There we probably want to less consider caching and more consider executing. So what we can do: develop several algorithm enums and change it according to runtime platform. I heavily do it for my input system.


Other side:
1. Close look at polycount/bones/influence.
2. Heavy use atlasing and batching(console texture size limitation)
3. Make sure UV got maximum space.
4. When creating texture, I go with bigger one(4k atleast). Then convert them all to smaller sizes(2k,1k,512k,256k etc) as backup.

From development sides, those are the things I do.

And oh, good art can eliminate some heavy calculation. End user do not care chip insides, they only cares of how it looks outside.

 

Yes, definitely need to have tools and testing for each platform. Texture size and compression varies a lot, including lightmaps. You might have vertex lighting on one platform and vertex lighting + lightmaps on another. Each console will also handle gamma levels differently, so you need to tweak your levels on each console. Alpha blending can be slightly different and you have to tweak the z-buffer. It goes on and on, tons of potential bugs that can pop up.

I've experienced working on a game for seven platforms concurrently: PC, PS2, PS3, XBox, XBox360, GameCube and Wii. Fun.

 

Well since I'm keeping my game to run on Android, yes. I will be honestly surprised if my game has such problems on a vastly superior system.

(I don't mean to sound rude, I know I never mentioned that I'm also developing for Android, and you are giving honest help. I thank you for that.)

Okay, that's a good point. I'm not using lighting, but I can see that I still want to look out for unexpected graphical changes.


So, I'd want to budget for more testing, and logically for more bug-fixes. Also, wow, big money for patches. Anything else I need to be aware of?

 

By the way, I just found this:

http://www.xbox.com/en-us/Developers/id

It seems I don't have any costs for certification nor updates on the Xbox One.
PlayStation I'm not 100% on, but it looks pretty simple.
But I really don't know about the Wii U; I can't even find who to ask about it. But they directly advertise the Unity engine on their site; the form to apply to be a developer directly asks you if you are interested in using Unity.

 

It certainly was like that (though first patch was free on the 360 I think?), but it's not any more. There was a big thing going around about MS abolishing fees for title updates and patches like 8 months ago.

 

It depends what you're aiming at. A PS3 or 360 isn't necessarily a "vastly superior" system depending on what resources your game uses. Sure there's plenty more oomph in some areas, but in other areas they may actually be worse. A very typical example is that my phone has more RAM than either a PS3 or a 360.

 

I get the impression that the ID@Xbox program is currently highly curated; it's actually pretty hard to get in right now. They've implied that they'll be opening it up more in the future and even that at some point you just use a retail Xbox One as a dev kit.

It'd be nice if it was as open as Xbox Live Indie Games was, but I'm not sure MS wants to go back to being *that* open. That was really great for devs though. Just pay your $99 a year, use your 360 as a dev kit, and enjoy a very friendly environment. Everything was considered an "M" rating, so you didn't even have to deal with getting an ESRB rating. And no weird NDA's to deal with.

PS4 I've heard you need a fairly pricey dev kit for and I believe Sony has to approve you. I don't know what the Unity situation is there; it's quite possible that you'd need an extra Unity license for that too.

Wii U dev I think is easier to get approved for, as Nintendo seems desperate for indie content.

You do need two pieces of dev kit hardware for Wii U. They give you a special version of Unity Pro for free. Nintendo is really weird with heavy duty NDA's though, which is part of why you don't see tons of info on public forums.

I think there's a special deal with ESRB ratings that you get free ratings if it's an indie game. Something like that. I don't know how the ratings in other countries work though.

 

Before you do anything else you should apply to be a registered developer with Sony / MS / Nintendo. The process takes time and the response is uncertain. To be blunt, the chances you will be accepted are slim. You will need a long development history or a currently successful game to stand a chance. Spots are contested and the platforms are highly curated.

Out of the three platform holders you stand the best chance with Nintendo who are being really friendly with devs right now. Having said that, you still need a proven history as a developer.

I wouldn't worry about stretch goals or technical / monetary requirements until you've been accepted as a developer first.

 

I know a few people who haven't had a single game published who were accepted by Sony into their development program. The only slim chance is with Microsoft.

Yeah... no. XBLIG was a complete, unmitigated disaster.

 

The prices I've read for PS4 development is a roughly £700 "debug console", and a somewhat pricier full workstation if your computer sucks. The cheaper option is what many indies who have released interesting games got from Sony (for free/loaners). If you happen to have a game already out there, let Sony know somehow. You never know what'll happen

There's also this:
https://psm.playstation.net/portal/en/index.html#register

Sign up there (free now, rather than the previous $99/year), then look for the beta-signup to get in the Unity for PSM lottery. They probably want established developers during beta, but eventually it'll be an option available to all. Unity for PSM is probably similar to ID@Xbox right now, but I tried anyway, if only to let me fill in some wishes in the sign-up form.

 

If you were in it to make money, sure. But it was a fun, accessible platform.

 

I applied as a Wii U developer and I got automated replies back but never an actual reply. Also I applied as part of where I work rather than indie/by myself which I thought we of at least got a reply. Guess we will go a different way and get some rifts instead.