Hi everyone,

here is a blog post straight from the programming people behind New International Track & Field:

"We were all really excited to be involved with New International Track and Field for Nintendo DS and one of the biggest coding challenges was the multi player online element which one of the most ambitious ever seen for the system.

A lot of the team had already spent considerable amounts of time and money playing on the original arcade machine over 25 years ago.
The driving factors for us as a team was to bring back the purity of the control system and also inject the fierce competitiveness that always surrounded any game of Track and Field.

Multiplayer for us was key, so we set about stuffing as much multiplayer content onto the cart as was physically possible.

Currently we have Local Wi-Fi (Multi-Card and Sharing), extensive online functionality (some of which is still secret) and even a ‘hot seat’ mode.

We’re doing some pretty cool stuff with online – players can sign into the T&F Network via their DS, carry on playing, and see up-to-date messages (via the news feed) of how they’re friends and rivals are doing and who’s currently leading on the world wide ranking boards (as well as info and stats about their own performances).

Players also get to see when friends and rivals come online; they get information about their competing performances and even get to know when their friends and rivals are setting up multiplayer games.

Bringing all this online functionality together under one easy - to - use interface has meant coordinating code between our online partners, Agora and Nintendo; no small feat for the coding team.

The core programming team is made up of 7 people and we intend to ramp that up to 10 now as we approach alpha stage.



Currently, the game sends tons of achievement data to the community website which is used to display rankings, times, distances etc.

This means that the player can extend the gaming experience into the online community and set up custom tournaments, enter the official Konami cups, earn stars to buy stuff in game and help with Community Goals too.

We really wanted to cram as much content onto the cart as possible, so the player benefits from lots of unlocks and additional prizes as they play and achieve goals.

With 24 unique events and character challenges with varying degree’s of difficulty, each playable with different characters (all of whom have alternate costumes) across numerous single and multiplayer game types, you’ll get an idea of the complexities involved in developing this title.

Not only does this scale of content throw up some surprises with cart space, but the 4 player events particularly start to push the available system memory.

As the game development continues it is now becoming almost a daily ritual to study the ‘smoke tests’ and squeeze in the content.

We anticipated cart space as being a potential headache, because we are really trying to keep the quality up, so we knew we’d need to use all the available memory.

Add to this the fact that each character needs many unique animations per event and you get a totals of around 8000 sequences of animation!

Trying to compress and fit all that onto one tiny cart that sits in the palm of your hand has been quite a challenge!

The game is very nearly at the alpha stage, but we just need to complete the remaining few events and a couple of challenges.

Since all these events are the individual responsibility of different programmers and have already been started, there shouldn't be too much pressure to complete these on time.

This week has seen the start of the ‘Hot Seat’ programming work. In this mode you will be able to get a multiplayer experience using a single DS.

The idea is that you take your turn and then pass the console around for your fellow competitors to challenge your performance.

The Track and Field game play lends itself perfectly to this mode.

Although this feature seems simple enough, it will actually take up the time of 3 different programmers to implement.

Overall, development on NIT&F has been great fun, but we’ve been extremely busy!

As always, we look forward to the game’s release and having the opportunity to hear player feedback.

We really hope that all the online facilities we’ve provided are popular with the fans, and that an active community of T&F gamers develops – that would be our ultimate reward!"