Need for Speed Underground 2 DS was a game for Nintendo DS.  My company (Pocketeers Limited) developed this immediately after the Game Boy Advance version with many of the same team members.  I oversaw art production, with a team of five additional artists.

As technical details for the then unreleased Nintendo DS were unavailable, our initial brief was to create an enhanced version of the Game Boy Advance version.  However, during production it became apparent that the Nintendo DS was significantly more powerful than we had originally expected.  So, rather than upgrade the Game Boy Advance graphics, we optimised the Sony PSP assets.  All code however, was written from scratch.

I found the DS to be a fairly awkward machine to create graphics for.  I recall it was a balancing act, trying to shoehorn as much detail into the environments as possible without dropping textures or polygons in the process.  We also had to provide collision data in the form of a second mesh.  And, due to technicalities in the way the system worked, some poly configurations would see the car fired meters up into the air.  This looked great, but sadly we weren’t allowed to keep it in!