[casual_games] Casual Game Framework

[Tom Hubina]

An API abstraction isn't really the hardest part ... it's the difference in
user interface, gameplay, etc that is required to make a quality commercial
title that is able to compete for the top slots on the mobile carriers and
casual game portals. If you just want to make something that simply "runs on
both", you can do that. If you want to make something that's competitive,
you're looking at a much different animal.
 
As for "across all the required handsets" ... Gridrunner has about 5% of the
total "required" handsets, and doesn't have BREW or WIPI (and only a few US
J2ME handsets for that matter). It also is only dealing with two out of the
dozen or so screen sizes and doesn't appear to have support for 64k and 128k
download size limits. Also, I notice that the handsets with slower
processors and low heaps (like the Motorola RAZR) aren't in the list either.
OK - it's not as bad as only supporting PDAs, but most of these phones
typically fall under the "smartphone" category I mentioned before, which
makes up a pretty miniscule portion of the US/EU market. I'm also curious
how much testing has been done on the handsets that are listed because I'm
familiar with sound bugs in at least a few of them that frequently requires
different code for different handsets in that list (emulator testing doesn't
count).
 
I'm sorry, but it is misleading to call something "quite easy" when you're
only doing a tiny fraction of the work that needs to be done.
 
Tom



  _____  

From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
On Behalf Of Mark Ripley
Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2007 6:33 AM
To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
Subject: Re: [casual_games] Casual Game Framework


On May 29, 2007, at 6:06 PM, Tom Hubina wrote:


If anyone tells you that an engine can cleanly support (or even remotely
cleanly) PC, Consoles, and Mobile devices you should look for the snake oil
that he's also selling. More than likely the only "mobile devices" they
support are PDAs and Smartphones and not the hundreds of millions of mobile
phones out there where you can actually make some money ;)


It's actually quite easy.

www.cheeky.gr : Blobbit Dash, Blobbit Push, Gridrunner++ -- across PC, Mac,
Linux, in App, Applet and Widget forms. Mobile as midp1, midp2 across all
the required handsets. A quick cut and paste, search-and-replace and it's on
xbox360. Palm too, if I could be bothered.

All from the same source, bar one class containing constants for screen
size, music format and so on.

Admitedly these are 2D games, but the API abstraction for the various
targets took one bloke in his spare bedroom a few weeks to write. Hardly
rocket science.

I'm sure the boys at Morpheme have something similar.

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