I have a dream, it’s a game. I have the concept, the audio part prototyped with input. It’s a game for multi-touch screens and nothing else.
You’ll see how behind being a [insert your brand/philosophy] fan, sometimes it’s not as easy as it seems when creating games and applications to choose a platform.
So from the start it’s pretty easy. Target: smart phones with touch screens. But then:
It gets messy.
Each point is important though the multi-touch and audio lib are obligatory ones: the gameplay relies on multiple input points and all the audio feedback is powered by the crazy awesome Fmod audio lib, which I feed with Fmod Designer. I’m still trying to figure out how to do the same as this tool does without it but it makes it so easy and perfectly well that I’m already discouraged. And not audio programmer enough to code my own engine. I can’t reinvent the wheel and maybe that’s a good thing. Firelight Technologies, creators of Fmod are doing it for 8 years now, making it better. I want to use their experience.
Performance/feasibility is virtually green for everyone but Android is changing so fast and by using the Java machine, it can be smooth, it can be awful. For extensive and advanced audio use Java is not that much recommended to say the least. On MS side well the new line of phones starts with high specs so it should be ok.
Ease of dev is critical. It provides the iteration loop, the faster you see what’s happening in the end-user scenario, the better. Apple is hard. Dealing with provisioning profiles, phone IDs and shit like that almost made me regret the buggy Nintendo DS tools. Also, Objective C. Also, iTunes and XCode. Awful. Android seems painful too and it’s hard to tell if it’s really easy, but in any case it’s getting better (NDK, Python/Lua bindings). Microsoft is marked as green because all we know is that the dev on Windows Phone 7 is going to be powered with XNA/Silverlight, both already used and tested for years. And yeah, they are easy and productive tools. Still, for the audio part Fmod is way ahead, but could be ported on MS phones easily I guess.
Freedom of content. Well Apple said it all last week. Let’s see if the competition is going to behave as sheep or not. They know this freedom is a big argument in their favors so I don’t think they’re going to.
Freedom of distribution. Well Apple said it all last week. Let’s see if the competition is going to behave as sheep or not. They know this freedom is a big argument in their favors so I don’t think they’re going to. Though, Microsoft is luring on this closed business model (ZuneHD apps). Please MS, don’t. I know you love to screw things up at the very end but please hold on to yourself on this one.
So basically for now I’m fucked even if my game idea is ready to live for real (so frustrating to play it with the mouse!!). I could change the input of my game but it would not be the same at all. Try to switch the audio lib but it’s not getting me anywhere, I’m relying on it so bad. I could still do a full prototype on the iPhone but I don’t own one/can’t develop on and I don’t want to have something that works and not being able to release it or worse, make it ship it and die unknown, between two farting apps.
It’s really frustrating. When Warren Spector is talking about how we so need the equivalent of camera and theatre screen, it’s not about copying the movie industry.
It’s about letting creators fulfill their ideas faster than once every two or three years at best. In 2010, it’s still a dream.
Sigh.
EDIT: by writing this post, I just found that someone has made Fmod available for Java, which means I could prototype, release and do my shit on Android. Maybe not (is it going to work perfectly as in C/C++? Way to make it native on Android?) but it reopens the problem!
Damn I love the internet. And the Open Source :-)
EDIT2: Shit, I just thought about it: a lot of Android phones don’t have the FPU unit needed by Fmod..What happens if I call the lib on the phone? Atrocious performance?
Welcome to one of my world.