How to Make a Massively Cross-Platform Game
blog.brokenfunction.com
How to Make a Massively Cross-Platform Game
1–10 of 42 posts
Re: How to Make a Massively Cross-Platform Game
#2A cross-platform game engine sounds awesome. But I wonder what kind of game can truly be write-once, run-everywhere, and considered "fun" on all platforms.
A few major challenges:
- Designing a game that is fun and intuitive to play with a wide variety of input controllers (touch, mouse, keyboard, joystick).
- Handling the entire spectrum of screen resolutions, from older iPhones to high-end desktop computers. The game would also probably need to work in both portrait and landscape modes.
- The QA effort alone could be huge. Testing on quirky desktop browsers or buggy Android devices alone could be a dealbreaker.
- I'd argue that the time spent trying to figure out a game design or technical workaround for a particular platform would be better spent focusing on one platform and making the game more fun. In my experience, trying to make a fun game involves a lot of trial and error and iteration, and I personally don't think I could do it if I also had to keep in mind multiple distinct target platforms.
I can envision a couple one-button games like Angry Birds or Tiny Wings possibly having a chance, but even in those cases, I'd argue it'd be better to nail one platform first and then incrementally add other platforms instead of spreading oneself too thin.
Re: How to Make a Massively Cross-Platform Game
#3Extremely useful information here. A naive way to approach cross platform architecture would be to work at a higher level of abstraction like working in a Domain Specific Language or pick a language with a good set of cross-compilers for various targets.
Lisp might encourage the first approach and Haxe follows the second.
Re: How to Make a Massively Cross-Platform Game
#4Unity.
Re: How to Make a Massively Cross-Platform Game
#5What about Java?
It has some quite mature 3d game libraries now, checkout jmonkeyengine for example and 2d is a doddle.
It can run on all 3 major desktop platforms as well as android (though you may have to use different libs for some parts) and can be embedded into a webpage easily via an applet.
The only platform you would need to re-implement for would be iOS but your going to hit that problem whatever you do (not sure what it's JS support is like though).
Of course the most crossplatform would just be to build the entire game using web forms in RoR or something.
I'm not sure though that cross platform games are even that great an idea as in reality you tend to end up with lowest common demoninator.
As a PC gamer I'm getting a bit annoyed by new games that used to be based around PC coming out primarily for console and then being ported to PC with dumbed down controls and graphics that don't do a high end PC justice.
Re: How to Make a Massively Cross-Platform Game
#6A cross-platform game engine sounds awesome. But I wonder what kind of game can truly be write-once, run-everywhere, and considered "fun" on all platforms. A few major challenges: - Designing a game that is fun and intuitive to play with a wide variety of input controllers (touch, mouse, keyboard, joystick). - Handling the entire spectrum of screen resolutions, from older iPhones to high-end desktop computers. The ga…
The closest you will get to this I think is Unity although that doesn't currently have Linux support.
All programming is done using Mono and it also contains a load of proprietary tools for asset generation as well as stuff for AI etc.
Re: How to Make a Massively Cross-Platform Game
#7Unity.
Or Shiva3D?
Re: How to Make a Massively Cross-Platform Game
#8A solid lisp implementation could be easily ported everywhere. I think this would’ve been my choice had I not found Lua.
While I'm a total Common Lisp fanboy a solid Lisp implementation is not easily ported everywhere. It's perhaps easier than most other languages but unless we have differing opinions of what solid[1] means it is by no means as easy as he makes it sound.
[1] So not my-first-Lisp-interpreter that everyone writes but actually something like Common Lisp or a Scheme implementation with lots of extensions.
Re: How to Make a Massively Cross-Platform Game
#9[deleted]
Re: How to Make a Massively Cross-Platform Game
#10The only disappointing part of this is that he did, without mentioning it as clearly as I would like, chuck away the 15% of people using IE before version 9.
On the other hand, non-canvas browsers have got down to 15%? I'm chucking my (painfully and buggy) DOM engine for my game this afternoon and ging just canvas. I should have paid more careful attention.