[mmjaa]

Does anyone have any experience with developing home-brew or indie games on the Switch here? I've considered getting one, but I'm limited by the rule "never buy a system for which I can't develop my own software" .. to what extent is this true of the Switch?

I'd love to put my Lua-based programming IDE on the Switch, which turns out is a bit similar to this Fuze project .. but I'm un-certain just how much of the Switch is locked down and how much is available. Do I have to register to get full features as a developer, or something?

[roblabla]

The switch is heavily locked down, and afaik getting into the developer program is expansive and out of reach for most. But with some hacking, we can get around that.

Homebrew is still brewing (excuse the pun). There are two toolchain being developed, libtransistor and libnx. To run the code, We have one public exploit for 3.0.0, and a private full system compromise for 1.0.0 all the way to 3.x, which should be published Soonish.

Disclaimer: I am heavily invested into libtransistor. This toolchain is still in the early days, but an snes emulator, doom and SDL got ported to it, with visual output (software rendered), audio and input.

Work is ongoing to get hardware acceleration, c++ support, and various other things. Some people are trying to port Love2D to the switch, allowing for homebrew written in lua just fine.

And a lot of the console is documented. Check the switchbrew.org wiki out.

[revjx]

Unlike the Wii U, which had a fairly accessible developer program, the Switch is still out of bounds to your average hobbyist developer. Nintendo have been pretty quiet about it too, other than instructing people to get in touch with them if they think they should have access to the Switch dev kit etc.

They've also been very quiet about whether the Nintendo Web Framework, a HTML / JS based set of APIs for the Wii U, would be available for Switch. I hope it is. Unity is great but the NWF would be great for prototyping etc.

[j2bax]

I haven't checked in on it recently, but last I did inquire, they were being very selective with developers that they approved for development on the platform. I think they decided to go with a highly selective quality over quantity approach unlike what they did on the Wii U which was pretty easy for just about anyone to get a development kit for.

[kbenson]

The original Wii was very selective when I looked into what it took when it first came out. Do you know whether the Wii U was fairly open initially, or just towards the end? I'm wondering if they just always start off being selective to ensure the quality is there initially, and open up more later?

That would make sense, as I think there's plenty of cases where a device hasn't been selective enough with the marketplace initially, and the deluge of crap makes people think the market isn't worth using. It's much easier to shovel crap out the door immediately than it is to deliver a polished product, so early markets can be quite bad.

[j2bax]

It was probably 1/2 way through the lifespan of the Wii U that our team was approved to develop for the platform. Not sure how restrictive they were before that.

Everything I've heard is that Nintendo is really trying to keep the quality bar high on the Switch e-shop though, which I can definitely appreciate. Sucks for really small shops that don't have the ability to jump through all the hoops and get approved, but its nice as a player to know the games probably aren't going to just be gimmicks. That said, the initial release of NBA Playgrounds on Switch was pretty abysmal... Fortunately they've been working to clean it up. I guess Nintendo probably just didn't want to be left out on their initial release and felt like an arcadey basketball game would be a perfect fit for the Switch demographic.

[yojex]

Check out https://yuzu-emu.org/

They're still in the early stages, but it's promising considering it's from the same team that made the successful Citra 3DS emulator. I know it's not technically "developing on the Switch", but it might give some insight.

[speps]

They just got progress last month on homebrew: https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8941-console_security_-_switch

[ReverseCold]

Even more progress yesterday, whole system on FW 3.0.2 and below has private homebrew. There's also a homebrew development library already out that you can use right now (on switch 3.0.0 only).