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Platforms Worth Targetting for Portable Games?
"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."
Since I'm a small fish in a big pond, I hope Slashdot readers can be my market research team.
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).
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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.
There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
I wouldn't waste my time with the ngage if I were you. I don't believe its that popular.
:)
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
Hmmm... You're a PPC game developer, The wonderful Yak is also a PPC game dev. You have a tempest-y looking game, and he is responsible for the glorious Tempets 2000 and Tempest 3000. Scientific conclusion: You must be kin!
***
Palm has become a indy developers dream, and I am surprised you didn't start there. It has a huge collection of software already, along with free dev tools, and the apps are small enough that a 1 man show can still write a best-in-class app or program. PalmOS is your friend.
You can develop for Symbian without paying for any tools. Its more than just the nGage. The Nokia 7650, 3650, 6600 and Siemans SX1 have all sold fairly well. Also the SonyEricsson P800 and P900 if you are prepared to work with both the Series60 and UIQ interfaces. There are many phone manufacturers supporting Symbian and I'm sure they must have already shipped loads more Symbian devices than Microsoft have shipped Smartphones.
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
Sun's web site assures me that with Java you can "write once, run anywhere".
Specifically, J2ME (micro edition) software is supposed to run on a wide variety of devices, some of which may actually exist.
Most people dont buy a PDA for its gaming capabilities. They play games to pass time. I wouldnt think even the most hardcore gamer would go out and buy a 500 dollar PDA for only purpose of playing games on it. My suggestion is to make games for the highest selling platform. The more people who have the oportunity to get the games the better.
so you can target sx1/that_sendo_one/7650/3650/3660/n-gage/6600/6620 at the same time. and anyways nokia doesn't look like it would drop series60 tomorrow, so there's potential market right there that's not going to disappear in mere months.
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, such as n-gage or whatever) feel free to test my asteroids clone http://kotiluola.net/~glass/visul.sis I haven't made a proper page or anything for it and it has a variety of bugs, but hey it's just something I've done while learning symbian just now.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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 but you could build your own or buy one off e-bay. You don't need a $5000 dev kit to program the GBA. And there are emulators that you can use to test your program and such. A single person can easily make a game.
The main site I'd like to point you to (although there are many) is GBAdev.org. You can find tools, tutorials, demos (with source) and more. There was going to be a book published about programing for the GBA but lawyers basically nixed it. The good news though is that the guy who wrote it put it online for free! You can find that book here (it's a bunch of PDF files).
Once you make your game, all you'd have to do is take it to a publisher (or get the big ,a href="http://www.nintendo.com">N's help) and you could sell it to the largest audience in the world. The GBA has more units sold than the PS2 or any other current console (IIRC).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I did some work on an established, GPLed Palm OS game (version 1.2 of Space Trader). That was fun! So I decided to write another Palm OS game.
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.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Some people are desperate. Some editors are nuts.
Whoring the link to your cheap ass video game is not going to get me to buy it. Asshole.
With the Shark development system you can have your game on all the portable platforms out at the moment. No muss, no fuss.
... 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 hardware for the platform wisely. My only PDA at the moment (Casio BE-300, waiting to purchase a Zaurus SL-6000L) is absolutely pathetic for certain games (Doom for one due to use of the pathetic thumbpad) but is great for others (mahjong, card games, anything that the stylus is the preferred input method). So, whatever you decide to program too, try to put feelers out and get user input as to what to d, and what not to do.
CliffH
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
Think about it - most of Sprint's phones, a good portion of Nextel's phones, some AT&T phones, and most likely some T-Mobile, Cingular, and Verizon phones have J2ME support. My AT&T Nokia 3100 was a free phone, and it has J2ME (I need a data cable or their pay-out-the-ass mMode service to add apps, though). I think there are some J2ME developers here on /. who could help you out. Come to think of it, I want to see a J2ME implementation of BZFlag (it would be radar-only - cell phones don't have THAT much horsepower nowadays).
J2ME is probably the best to get the game on to the broadest range of platforms. It'd work on Palm devices definitely, but you'd also have a HUGE base for smartphones (the group of platforms, not the single MS platform) as well as most other 'normal' phones that are now on the market.
:-)
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 free. Just sign up as a developer with Nokia and you can get them and the simulator/emulator for free to test your app on, even if you don't have a Series 60 phone.
Personally, I'm doing my development for J2ME simply because of the bigger market. But having said that, most of my apps are being aimed at Series60 J2ME platforms. Its just nicer. Its still easy to have it run on other J2ME devices, but I prefer the Series60
Java 2 Micro Edition (or J2ME) is supported on a ton of devices and comes on pretty much any new mobile phone you can buy today.
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, so if you don't like Java you won't like J2ME, but I liked it.
Seriously. Code for POSIX, use libSDL properly, and maintain a good front on the cross-platform libs for whatever stuff you feel you might need.
... you are gonna write a kick-ass game? Not just some copy ...
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
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Target a virtual machine. The z-machine is obvious if you don't need graphics
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 probably not
ready for primetime yet, though it's one to watch in the years to come. I am
sure there are other choice I'm forgetting at the moment.
The advantage of targeting a VM is that you don't have to do the portability
work; it's been done. You write once for the VM, and it runs on every platform
that has an implementation of that VM. The z-machine is best, because there
are multiple implementations of it on pretty much every platform, from Acorn
to Gameboy. (It was designed to be implemented on 8-bit micros in the 80s,
so it fits easily on handheld systems today.) The big problem with the
z-machine, of course, is no graphics.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I thought the whole selling point of the Zodiak was that it was PalmOS-based...
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
Itanium. Then you may try Xeon and Opteron.
After that, try the G5, it's a nice platform. Porting to SUN Sparc may be a good idea too...
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; 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 position, you just might be able to set up your own GBA cart fab operation just like Color Dreams, Codemasters, and American Video Entertainment did on the old NES.
Afraid you'll get sued? You have precedent behind you. Accolade successfully defended a lawsuit from Sega, and AVE and one of Codemasters' USA distributors each successfully defended a lawsuit from Nintendo. Following those, Color Dreams never got sued in the first place. In Atari Games v. Nintendo, Atari Games (known on console platforms as Tengen, now part of Midway) lost only because it developed its games using information gained by defrauding the U.S. Copyright Office.
Look into mobile games. With J2ME and BREW technology, its pretty easy to get your programs onto any decent handset. Think about it, there are over 1 billion cell phone users. Where ese do you have that kind of an install base. I work in a startup company doing cell games right now and business is so good that were always looking for engineers to hire....