Platforms Worth Targetting for Portable Games? 36
"Here are my beliefs:
PalmOS is doable, but in order to get any kind of graphics out of a Palm you need to target ARM-based Palm devices. How many Palm gamers actually have these more expensive Palms?
Tapwave Zodiac is tempting, their SDK is easy to license, but how many gamers are actually dropping the cash to buy these?
It doesn't look like it's too difficult to get into Nokia NGage development, but how many gamers are taking the NGage seriously?
Consoles and GBA are out of the question, these platforms are locked down so only the big studios can play, and I simply don't have the resources to make a title for these platforms that can stack up against the competition.
Since I'm a small fish in a big pond, I hope Slashdot readers can be my market research team."
n/t (Score:4, Funny)
Thank you so much for preempting all the "do your own research, asshole" posts. Unfortunately, you did not preempt all the people that will whine about those posts anyway (me).
PalmOS is probably good (Score:3, Informative)
There's plenty of resources for homebrew GBA dev, but if you want to market a game commercially then you're out of luck unless you decide to try selling the game to a Nintendo developer. It's not inconceivable, but highly unlikely.
I don't think any of the other platforms you mentioned are worth considering at this point. I don't even know of anyone who has bought a TapWave or an N-Gage. In the future, PlayStation Portable might be interesting but knowing Sony they'll not go out of their way to make it easy for third-party developers (but again, you can always try selling the game to another publisher, like Crave). Sony is very homebrew-dev-friendly, though.
But yeah, PocketPC and PalmOS are really the only two choices if you want any chance at selling it as a shareware/independent effort.
Targets (Score:1)
If the people you are targeting are palm 'gamers' then they would obviously shell out for the palm with better graphics support, so there's one target.
What about just the pc? You won't make much with one game but if you produce many small simple games and do something like popcap does with yahoo games then you might have a little luck.
If all else fails try Linux or Mac, I hear they are hard up for games
are you a relative of the yak? (Score:1)
Palm! (Score:4, Insightful)
Symbian (Score:2)
Java? (Score:3, Funny)
Specifically, J2ME (micro edition) software is supposed to run on a wide variety of devices, some of which may actually exist.
Re:Java? (Score:2)
Re:Java? (Score:2)
Re:Java? (Score:1)
Brian
Re:Java? (Score:1)
Java enabled mobile phones will be everywhere shortly, so should be a good platform to target. The latest ARM processors include Java acceleration called Jazelle [arm.com] that will be making their way into most mobiles (nearly all mobiles use ARM processors).
Nokia has plenty of information on getting started in their developer's Forum [nokia.com].
its a PDA (Score:1)
Re:its a PDA (Score:1)
The emu options for PDAs are really great: mame/nes/snes (the last is a little slow, but fine for rpg's). None of that catridge crap like gameboy, one microdrive and I have a huge library of games.
n-gage is series60.. (Score:2)
the sdk is availabe from forum.nokia.com, the docs aren't really great though(well, they suck goat balls), but I've managed to get something done without having any documentation besides that's whats available on the net.
oh and if somebody has one (series60 phone, su
GameBoy Advanced (Score:2)
First of all, it's really not that hard to program for and most languages are available (with free compilers no less). You don't need a library, although there are ones out there that might have a license that would suit you. All you need is a flash cart and a flash cart programmer and those aren't too hard to get and don't cost that much. You'll have to look around for one bu
Re:GameBoy Advanced (Score:2)
Fabbing your own GBA carts (Score:2)
Nintendo won't even talk to you unless you're a multi-million dollar company with a publishing contract because the carts are so expensive to duplicate (being ROMs, the physical manufacturing process is quite involved).
Nintendo doesn't need to talk to you. The GBA has a simple seek/read multiplexed bus [desaign.de]; anybody with access to mass production of PCB, ASIC, ROM, and plastic shells can manufacture Game Paks for you. Sure, there's an initial investment, but if you pool your resources with others in the same
My Palm OS Experience (Long and Unfocused) (Score:4, Informative)
Hence "Flummox" was born. Frankly, it's been a pain in the ass.
Flummox was born as "Rigmarole." I did a name search initially, but I probably misspelled in Google, or confused which variant spelling I'd used. Boom! I got slapped by the Trademark owner of the Rigmarole game. While the slapping was a bit legalistic, it was appropriate; I was in the wrong. So I renamed the game Flummox.
In my description of Flummox on my Palm Gear page, I meantion that if you like Bejewelled, Tetris, or Marbles, you'll probably like Flummox. Well, Handmark has acquired the rights to Tetris on the Palm platform, and sent me an email cease and desist from mentioning Tetris in my page. While I'm clearly in the legal right (check the Lanham Act's statutory fair use provision, 33(b)(4), 17 U.S.C. 1115(b)(4)), they went around me and told Palm Gear they'd sue if my page wasn't taken down. Or so they say; I doubt they really needed to threaten, since they do a lot of business with Palm Gear. While it is enormously frustrating to me to capitulate to a big bully with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, it's not worth it to me to spend the time or money to defend my rights in this case. So I had to capitulate, and remove the word Tetris from my page. Palm Gear, however, kinda sucks, and never re-indexed, so if you search for Flummox on their site, you won't find it, even though it's there.
Now, enough whinging about my trademark troubles.
You'll need to advertise to get anywhere. Probably a lot. The Palm market is heavily saturated with games, and it's hard to get people to download your game. It's also hard to get any registrations (if you're doing shareware, like I am). I have yet to make back the price of the compiler. It could just be that my game is no fun. Still, among the test players, I had very positive feedback.
When it comes to the Palm OS, configurations are also kind of a pain in the ass. While I love the simplicity of the Palm philosophy, Palm OS is still an ancient OS model. No protected memory. No common standards (or APIs) for displays beyond the original 160x160. If you're going to run from the expansion card, you have to code carefully. There are a lot of gotchas from the evolution of the OS. Just because you can run on the emulator (or now the simulator), doesn't mean you won't crash on specific devices.
So, long story short, it's a challenge. It can be a pain in the ass. But it can also be fun. For all my bitching and moaning, I had fun working on both games.
Re:My Palm OS Experience (Long and Unfocused) (Score:1)
If you want to write games for Palm and succeed, do something absolutely mind-boggling. The "Wolfenstein" for Palm is still yet to be written
Re:My Palm OS Experience (Long and Unfocused) (Score:2)
OK. I shouldn't get defensive. There's no question: it's not an "absolutely mind-boggling" game. I think it's a good game, and some of my play testers really got addicted. But it's certainly no genre-definer, no revolution, nothing of lasting significance.
Believe me, I've tried to come up with a mind boggling game as hard as anyon
Re:My Palm OS Experience (Long and Unfocused) (Score:1)
Do them all. (Score:3, Informative)
Without sounding too vague... (Score:1)
... you should program on the platform you feel most comfortable with. Handhelds still are a niche thing and, to be honest, most people won't buy them for their gaming abilities. The people who own them for other tasks though will more than likely buy games to play while on a long commute (plain, train, carpool, etc), waiting at the doctor's office, etc. You'll want to make a game that is fun yet not so engrossing that the player gets frustrated when they are interrupted. Also, make sure you use the hardwar
J2ME is the way to go... (Score:2)
J2ME and Symbian Series 60 (Score:2)
I suggest that if you code for Symbian, you code for Series60 instead of UIQ. Main reason being there is a bigger customer base in that market (More than just Nokia use the Series 60 interface) and the dev tools and SDKs are f
Go where the users are... (Score:2)
Most of the wireless providers also have developer programs and will help distribute your J2ME game as well as handling billing and some customer support (for a small %).
I made a blackjack MIDlet for J2ME, and it was pretty easy to use. There's a ton of documentation and free tools out there and I never ran into a problem that I couldn't find the answer to. Of course, it's Java,
Re:Go where the users are... (Score:1)
A problem is that in order to get any kind of good graphics you need to use vendor specific graphic routines. I still don't have a phone capable of doing Midp but when I get one I intend to play around with it some.
I'll tell you which Platform: LINUX. (Score:1)
Linux runs on a hell of a lot more systems than anything else, and a "PalmOS Linux-loader" to get into a seriously kick-ass game is absolutely feasible, if not done already.
That is the point of the exercise, right
virtual machine (Score:1)
and is probably the second-most-portable format after plain ASCII text. (The
only other serious contender is HTML, but HTML is less consistent, and the
z-machine is much more powerful and was designed for games.)
You mention graphics, though, so if that's important, look into a different
virtual machine. glulx supports some graphics for example. Of course there's
Java, but it's more heavyweight and so less portable. Parrot is prob
Isn't Zodiak Palm based? What about GP32 (Score:2)
Also worth looking at is the GamePark, or GP32... doesn't have a lot of market share, since the company that makes it seems to want to keep it to their own country (Korea?)
--D
Mobile Games (Score:1)