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Game Development On Android
Gamasutra is running an article about the state of game development on Android. The author explains some of the strengths and weaknesses of the platform, and makes comparisons to development on the iPhone. Quoting:
"While iPhone apps are written in Objective C, the Android SDK uses relatively more programmer-friendly Java. The iPhone store charges developers $99 a year to distribute their apps, while Android has a one-time $25 fee for developers. And the review process for iPhone apps grows increasingly lengthy — sometimes weeks or more — and it's somewhat arcane. Android apps go live as soon as the developer hits the publish button. Google handles the review process post-hoc, and is much more lax in terms of content. ... For now, if a developer decides to implement a game exclusively for a particular smartphone platform, and the choice is between the iPhone and Android, the tradeoff is between trying to get noticed in an incredibly crowded and competitive market where the potential payoff is huge for those at the top, or entering a market with low barriers, little competition, currently low returns, but the possibility of potential growth."
I think that Android's future depends not on Google but on the devices that run it. Apple has the advantage of controlling both the platform and the device. So you know that whatever you develop for the iPhone it will work. But Android resembles more the PC market where there are different memory capacities, 3d acceleration or not, multi touch or not, keyboard or not, etc. That's why I don't play games on my PC and I bought a separate games console. Because I don't want to care about requirements.
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You're being shortsighted though. While your numbers might currently be true, you're not seeing the big picture in all of this. Apple is 2 years old on the market, they are past their initial launch boost and they have exactly 1 product with different capacities.
Android is less than a year old on the market, many of the Android devices are announced and coming this fall/winter. They have many more carrier deals than the iPhone has, and already more devices. Expect the tables to turn in 1-2 years. Apple will become the niche and Android will be everywhere. That is if they manage to supplant Symbian which right now has 3 times more market share than the iPhone and Android put together.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
They have many more carrier deals than the iPhone has, and already more devices. Expect the tables to turn in 1-2 years. Apple will become the niche and Android will be everywhere.
iPhone and Android are in different kinds of market. iPhone's disadvantage *is not* that it only has one device on the market; it's an advantage for Apple, since it's the exact same phone for the whole platform, while in Android (and Symbian/Windows Mobile and so on) developers have to count all different kinds of devices and make separate apps for every phone. However, for Android it's also their advantage that they will have more models on the market.
They do not necessarily have to fight with each other. Both PC and Consoles have been for long in the same gaming market and both are still doing good. And iPhone and Android are even more far away from each other.
Twenty years ago, in Europe, the PC was a dull machine that you only ever ran business applications on. Maybe a flight simulator if you're lucky. The Mac was an obscure machine for desktop publishing. If you wanted gaming, you bought an Amiga or Atari ST. Now look where we are.
You're pointing at the entrenched PC games market, where everyone has hugely invested in writing in C++ for the Microsoft Direct3D API.
By comparison, smartphones are relatively new and the investment in Apple's iPhone API is tiny compared to the gigantic Windows-only ecosystem (Windows-only middleware, Windows-only tools, Windows-only 3D programmers, etc.) that keeps gaming chained to PCs.
So, given Android programming is much easier (far more programmers know Java than Objective C), and there's not yet a huge iPhone-only ecosystem in place, switching is still relatively painless. All it would take is one damn good phone running Android to topple Apple off its perch.
Does my bum look big in this?
No, they're really not. iPhone and Android compete in the same space, with the same kind of marketing and appeal to the same kind of crowd. They are Internet devices that happen to have phones in them. And Android is pretty device agnostic contrary to Symbian. The Android Market is open to all Android phones and Apps aren't really limited to certain phones yet (the ones on the market all share the same specs under the hood). You can think the iPhone is safe, but Apple has a lot of competition coming in the next few years and they better be ready to fend it off.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
It's always interesting to guess at the future, but at my day job (definitely a Windows shop) everyone is buying Apple hardware and nobody even mentions Android. You may be right, but Google has a long march ahead of them.
Could you please explain the link between hardware requirements and game innovations ?
I just don't see it.
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1. Windows Mobile is on a lot of different devices but according to Canalysis, the iPhone outsold all WM devices combined worldwide last quarter.
2. Rob Glaser, founder and C.E.O. of RealNetworks (circa 2003), ''It's absolutely clear now why five years from now, Apple will have 3 to 5 percent of the player market.'' Plays4Sure devices were suppose to overtake Apple and leave Apple a niche player....
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/30IPOD.html?ei=5007&en=750c9021e58923d5&ex=1386133200&partner=USERLAND&pagewanted=all&position=
You can use logic all you want to show the advantages Android phones have, but until the shine wears off for the iPhone fans and people realize just how tied their hands are, it will remain the dominant phone.
You're half right, the other part of the shine equation is eventually, the air of exclusivity will wear off and apple will become the next burberry and chavs will have them and then no one will want one.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
This problem has been solved long ago by incremental garbage collection. Apple's Objective-C 2.0 also has garbage collection BTW.
Android doesn't use incremental garbage collection. Or JIT for that matter.
Yes, Android uses a converter that changes java bytecode to a different beast entirely, and performs a large number of global optimisations that decrease size and increase speed - ones that a compliant Java VM isn't allowed to do. So it ends up going about the same speed as JIT, but only needs the power a small phone supplies.
As for garbage collection - Android performs about as well as a C/C++ program filled with malloc()/free() or new/delete. C/C++ games programmers could do that, but they choose not to because they know that avoiding malloc/free/new/delete gives them a performance boost. Android has exactly the same tradeoff - avoid object creation in your code! Create what you need at the start of a level and then don't free it until the end of the level. You'll get good performance. Android has an entire section on how to get good performance, just like C/C++ programmers have plenty of strategies for getting good performance out of any platform.
Does my bum look big in this?
Java may appeal to some, but many of us just want C/C++ (Objective-C, allows that).
Games on consoles and PC are normally not developed in Java for many good reasons. Game developers that want to transition to phones are likely to prefer to stay with C++ where they can use their tools of choice, such as Visual Studio.
In fact, I think that a few people out there already develop C++ on PC and keep the actual iPhone/XCode build on the side. This is a big plus for those that are already making games and would like to try to use their knowledge and tools for a cell phone game..
"La presi e te la pagai (480.000 Lire)"
The shotgun approach to competition isn't guaranteed to work. I highly doubt Apple is just going to sit around and let the competition pass it up. In the end it's going to be about three things: features, marketing/reputation, and app store contents. And right now Apple has an advantage in both marketing and their app store. Feature comparisons change with every new model is more transient than the other two.
Think about it this way. If you need to lubricate something (not like that), what kind of lubricant do you reach for? Most people would say WD-40. Yet WD-40 is general purpose, only sells one type of oil, and really hasn't changed in something like 40 years. Having a good reputation is the key. That gets diminished when you put your platform on different hardware. Why do you think Microsoft decided to produce the Zune as a different device than the PlaysForSure shotgun approach before it? They found that in the handheld gadget arena people stick with brands rather than platforms. So they had to craft their own brand separate from their own existing platform.
You're half right, the other part of the shine equation is eventually, the air of exclusivity will wear off and apple will become the next burberry and chavs will have them and then no one will want one.
Don't assume that everyone picks a phone based on who else uses it or whether it is trendy.
Many people pick phones based on how it works and what it does - I certainly chose an iPhone on that basis, because the UI was the first one which felt like it was actually designed with a user in mind. The UI on the iPhone is good in my opinion, much better than what came before. It's quite a good phone (*if* your telephone service is good), the software is updated regularly, and in spite of Apple's control freak tendencies on their store, and the crapflood which is the app store listings, it has a lot of games and a lot of interesting other apps.
I have no idea about the Android JVM, but in a regular Java JVM object creation is actually significantly faster than malloc. This article is quite old, but shows that even back in 1.4.2 days it was nothing to be scared of.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
name a market segment that cares about *any* of that then get back to me.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Objective-C is not all that bad...
I'm a Java Web developer, without any real experience on desktop programming. But recently I was given the chance to do a small iPhone app for one of our clients, so I had to learn Objective-C from scratch to do it.
Objective-C might seem a little weird at first, but when you got used to the sintax the concepts used on the frameworks are not all that different from the Java counterparts. Appkit for example is much more pleasant to work with than Swing, for example.
It took around a week to learn the Objective-C basics, and another week to build a fairly complete prototype of the application.
So while might be a barrier for Java developers, it's not that high.
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The biggest strength the iPhone platform has is that the screen sizes are all the same, which makes game development much easier. You can optimize for that resolution and the standard set of inputs, instead of having to accommodate some people without multi-touch, some people with a keyboard and some without, all with different screen sizes that may affect the playing field.
The iPhone game developer does have the same issues as far as 3D power though, because the 3Gs and newer Touch devices support a more advanced version of OpenGL than does the original 3G platform (and remember, those are still being sold new!). So you have to decide if you want to support just one platform or program to allow for downgraded capability on some devices (which Apple makes about as easy as it can be I think, but it's still some work).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Most people want a phone that looks cool, plays good games, has good music playing capability and is fun to use.
Class, notice that people do not want a phone that can make calls. That is why the iPhone does well while its phone capabilities are lacking.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
While 90k+ apps & over 2bln downloads makes it harder to get noticed, those numbers say it all.
I've used a few Android phones and I like them. But the thing that makes the iPhone great to develop for (after you get past obj-c hurdle, the api's are actually really good) is that it's *standard*. One form factor, end of story. I can't help but think Android is gonna fall into the same hole that J2ME did when it tried to support everything. Already developers are maintaining separate branches for separate devices for Android. I've developed J2ME apps before and they are a f-ing nightmare. That platform never took off for a reason, because there's *too much* choice and diversity. Everything to all people; good luck.
There are also no where near as many Android users as iPhone and so developing for that platform with the intent to make some money on your app is not very plausible at this point. Maybe in a few years, maybe not. (Plus I hate Eclipse, so much unnecessary bloat, just like Java. I want tools that are fast and that don't require 5mil downloads of some frameworks I'll never use. But the Eclipse thing is only my hang up and I'm sure most Android devs won't care.)
So as a developer what makes more sense? 5 code bases for 5 Android phones - all with different form factors / features - and relatively little money for all your toil? Or one platform and the chance to hit it big? It's the same argument on a PC; develop for the huge Windows market, or everyone else?
1). I don't really care about innovations done for "scalability" done for PCs. With a console, you know exactly what everyone has, therefore you can optimize your art assets, audio assets, and your engine to run on that specific hardware. With a PC, you're wasting time trying to figure out how to dynamically determine if this player has obscure graphics feature C and dealing with turning it on or off. That's time that could be spent on real innovations, such as gameplay, that the "market" (players) actually care about.
2). Console generations are typically longer, than graphics card generations. This gives the developers more time and experience with the hardware, and the ability to do amazing things on it a few years after its launch that no one thought possible at launch. And these innovations are available to everyone who bought the console, not just those that decided they have the money to spend on 8 nVidia cards running at once.
3). There are plenty of "low-end" systems out there; they are called handhelds, and there is some terrific innovation going on there in trying to get more graphics power from their already limited processors. Take Square-Enix, for example. When they ported Final Fantasy III to the DS, they wanted to include some FMV cutscenes. Unfortunately, the processor for the top screen wasn't powerful enough to draw it alone. So they innovated, and brought in the processor for the bottom screen to help.
First you say that Dwarf Fortress couldn't not exist on a console, then you laud it for its portability. Wouldn't that portability lend itself to being ported to a console?
About the only point that still stands is the modability of PC games, which I will concede. Most developers are quite good at packaging the same tools they used to create the game, and giving them to the community at release or shortly after.