Platforms Worth Targetting for Portable Games?

rudescotsman asks: "Hi, I'm an independent game developer who just finished his first game on the Pocket PC and SmartPhone platforms. I targeted PPC/SP originally because that's what I owned and the dev tools are easily accessible, but now I'm thinking I'd like to write games for other platforms too. What platforms do Slashdot readers think are appropriate for a one-man game coding-squad to tackle?"

"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."

Comments

PalmOS is probably good

[notsoclever]

ARM-based Palms have basically taken over for the old Dragonball series at this point. Anyone who is interested in playing games on their PDA will have upgraded already.

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.

My Palm OS Experience (Long and Unfocused)

[angst_ridden_hipster]

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.

Do them all.

[Kris_J]

With the Shark development system you can have your game on all the portable platforms out at the moment. No muss, no fuss.