Namco Bandai steps up internal technology efforts

Japanese super-developer/publisher Namco Bandai has revealed a little of its cross-team framework plans in a job posting on Japanese site Job Enta.

While many studios in the West have been working on developing shared technology between their teams, Japanese studios have been slower on the uptake. The first to publicly announce such an initiative was Capcom, which debuted its (recently award-winning) MT Framework at CEDEC several years ago, and has since gone to power cross-platform hits such as Lost Planet, Dead Rising, Devil May Cry 4 and the forthcoming Resident Evil 5. Square Enix also formally acknowledged version 1.0 of its cross-platform engine, Crystal Tools, at this year’s GDC, which is being used to power Final Fantasy XIII.

The job posting says that the company’s development staff are ‘eagerly developing middleware in order to deliver high quality games that break into the high def era’. A seperate posting for the job on Namco Bandai’s website mentions that the position involves ‘all sorts of middleware, from graphics, physics, core framework, movies, UI and converters’.