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Game Devs Weigh In On Windows Phone 7
The mobile games industry has exploded over the past few years, driven largely by titles built for iOS and Android. The Guardian's games blog decided to investigate the pros and cons of Windows Phone 7 as a game development platform while it struggles to catch up to its predecessors.
"... the easy portability of code between WP7 and Xbox, plus the wealth of online tutorials, libraries and community support, is a massive advantage, especially for smaller and less experienced teams. ... As with Xbox Live Arcade, the console's downloadable games service, Windows Phone 7 offers a curated experience, which means Microsoft controls the quality of games appearing on the device. ... [Steven Batchelor-Manning of Nerf Games says,] 'The App Hub offers a good peer review system, where other developers are asked to check over your game. This helps filter out both low quality and bug-ridden titles. We are always given a particular quality to aim for. Once it's got past this stage there is also a chance that Microsoft will veto against your game going on the platform. Ultimately, this prevents the market being swamped, but above this, there seems to be a layer of games by big publishers (EA, etc) that just step past the smaller developers in the queue. This is the biggest drawback of the system.'"
To me the article read like a blatant fanboy story, but maybe I'm just jaded.
And then I got to this: "As with Xbox Live Arcade, however, Microsoft is set to run its own games promotions, to help market promising titles. The project kicks off this spring with a Must Have games season, which features six Windows Phone 7 titles, including Angry Birds, Doodle Jump, Hydro Thunder and Plants vs Zombies. "
Sure, those are promising titles - after all, they're already big hits on iOS and Android. But how the heck is this tied to the article's repeated meme regarding Windows/XBox-specific tools, and easy cross-development between XBox Live and WP7? It's certainly unlikely any of them were written in C#.
#DeleteChrome
I don't understand why they focus so much on developers porting XBLA games, when they should be caring about iPhone or Android developers porting their games and applications to WP7. I can understand that they will not run Java on their system to avoid problems with oracle, but nothing avoids them from offering C++ / ObjC, which are both available on Apple and Google platforms. This allows a much larger amount of developers (and middlewares such as Unity) to offer the same on WP7 as everywhere else. .NET , I think developers will just keep writing their code in wathever is supported by the market leaders (Java, ObjC and C++), as they will not ditch their entire codebases to please Microsoft.
By forcing everyone to use
It's "less-bad" than Apple. Microsoft unambiguously documents, exactly, everything that's required to pass certification. If your app fails marketplace certification, they point you to the section in the certification requirements document that your app violates. You can also ask for technical exceptions to the certification requirements for your app, but they're evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
"Professional" mobile games (i.e. by commercial dev companies) are almost universally written in straight C/C++ with minimal ObjectiveC / Dalvik wrappers to get to the phone hardware.
If you have a hit title, do you -really- want to have to rewrite the whole thing from top to bottom to port it to other platforms?
I spent several months a few years back working hard to convince my employer (a certain US carrier) that going ahead and launching a J2ME-based mobile platform (in the last 00's - this is post-iPhone, people) was would elicit nothing more than mockery (and, at best, shovelware) from the developer community. My employer subsequently canned the idea, and I like to think that my steely knives helped kill the beast.
My main argument was that forcing developers to rewrite significant portions of code almost guarantees you won't get major titles, regardless of your hardware lineup.
One of the smartest things Google did with Android was the NDK; I recently ported a top-10 iPhone 3d game (written 99% in straight C/++) to Android NDK and including my getting-to-know-you time I was done in 3 weeks. Was scorchingly fast on the Galaxy Tab compared to iPad.
The frank reality is that iOS is very obviously the largest mobile platform for developers, and others (Android, WP7, WebOS etc) must make it as easy as possible to port titles over. ;-) but it appears they were smart enough to provide a plain-vanilla C++ and OGLES environment for games.
Google did a marvellous job of adding this capability; NDK gives you plenty enough bare metal to port easily from other platforms.
I've not looked at WebOS
Android and iPhone can handle running native code apps just fine. If WP7 can't make itself a viable (easy!) porting target like Android, it's going to be spending a lot of Saturday nights at home watching TV waiting for the phone to ring.
[FrLz]
That the game could be crappy story/gameplay wise is one thing, but Nintendo would not allow what we see in the PC gaming world nowadays: games full of bugs that make you feel like you are some kind of quality assurance technician working for those companies. And let me tell you another thing, I wholeheartedly believe that the programmers back in the day had to work their ass off pulling stuff in really underpowered hardware, with no niceties. Before, a company was able to program with optimized assembly code something like Mario Bros 3 and today, in the age of awesome debuggers, code profilers, source control, object-oriented programming and what not, we get this products that are rushed out of the door. I guess we have to thank the Internet for that. With the XBox360 I saw how that patch craze is coming with a vengeance to the console world. Part of that Nintendo Seal of Quality is that they would not allow something like EA to exist. You could only develop up to five titles per year.
Other than that, with Nintendo you get the guarantee that you get a nice, clean and fun games with the system, plus more or less affordable hardware. You could get an original NES system with 2 controllers, zapper and two games for $100, and today the Wii is still the cheaper of the big three by $100. If you ask me which system I would get for my kids I would chose Nintendo without blinking. The other systems expose too much unnecessary violence, sex and gore and their kid users kind of remind me of that tech kid in the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie. I have seen 10 year olds both in Canada and the US with stuff like Grand Theft Auto in their system, and since not all parents are created equal, then the kid that does have it is pretty much the cool kid in the block. That's like a big social issue to me.
Right, because everybody knows that 90% of a game's code is in its UI and input system. Things like the game engine, AI, logic controlling elements in the game, resources, and netcode are completely irrelevant, right?
To be fair, WP7 doesn't support much in the way of netcode right now, and it's certainly not trivial to shift UI paradigms. However, that doesn't mean that the ability to use XNA, and resuse a lot of code as a result, isn't still quite valuable.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
...so I'll burn a bit here :)
I am an indie game developer working mainly with XNA. I have published a few XBox Live Arcade titles, plus a few WP7 ones. The ease of portability is really high. The only difference (granted, this is not necessarily trivial to implement) is the input devices, which are the first thing I wrap away because for various reasons it is useful to have a game that works well in Windows with kb + mouse. When porting to wp7 no additional code is required. Usually lighting and shaders will be toned down (not much to do, just set different techniques in the stock shaders) and models and textures must be reduced in detail, both for storage and rendering performance.
In the end this is the reason why our games will keep ending also in the wp7 marketplace even though sales are not as high: the development costs for porting are so low that even few sales result in a gain...
My book: Friendly F#, fun with game development and XNA; my game: Galaxy Wars by VSTeam; my gamedev language: Casanova.
Technically Microsoft do not have to pay for product placement on slashdot (and it seems unlikely that they would have done so and even more unlikely that this traditionally anti-Microsoft site would have acquiesced). Favourable articles about Windows 7 results in a large number of posts, and this translates into more ad views. Like it or not, Slashdot makes money by being controversial.
That said, the pro-Windows 7 comments (at least for the desktop version) are in keeping with the positive reception of the platform all over the net and is reflected in the increased sales of the OS compared to Vista. For this reason, claims of paid product placement and astroturfing seem highly unlikely. Obviously the recent douche who made incredibly obvious pro-Microsoft "astroturfings" under a variety of new accounts is the exception. But that was so blatant that it had to be a troll, rather than a real shill.
As for Windows Phone 7 (back on topic), often the people who have actually used it seem to report favourably on the platform. But like me, most people haven't even tried it and just assume that it will not be very good. I suspect that this is due one incredibly stupid mistake, and that was to not support copy and paste.
This was such a major (and publicly derided) problem on the first version of the iPhone that the lack of the feature in Microsoft's product just screams that the platform is unfinished. Whoever made that decision at Microsoft should be hung, drawn and quartered - and then sacked.
As with the original iPhone, it will be worth waiting for the next version of Windows Phone 7 before buying. Myself, I'm going to wait until Windows Phone 7 version 3.1 - that was the right strategy in the past!