Search

Browse

Home

About

The Better Half

Gameeel.com

Recent Articles

Recent Comments

Shanghai

Friends

Feeds

RSS / Atom

Kissing Mobile Development Goodbye · Jul 20, 11:38 AM

In addition of quitting Gameloft, I’m also quitting mobile development, at least for the foreseeable years.

I’ve been working on mobile games since my internship days – and to date that’s almost 3 years. I kiss all that goodbye not because I crown myself a smart-ass and think that I’ve already known it all. It’s because more and more, mobile development is becoming largely frustrating and less rewarding for me.

Porting Woes

As one of the largest mobile game makers, we had to go for mass market appeal, and that means keeping every possible phone in mind while developing a game. Sell to the US market, you get a whole plethora of new phones to port to, open up the Korean market, even more! Note that “every possible phone” may mean 200 today and 220 the next month – new phones come in faster than old phones stop being supported.

In any project, porting is one crucial aspect that you cannot overlook, but sadly, I’ve never been in any projects that handled this aspect properly. Whenever I mention that Midnight Bowling had 30 credited programmers covering the Java, Brew and Doja platform, (not a secret, check up the credits list) people will either be very surprised or scoff at it thinking i’m lying. Even MMO’s are developed for less than that number, I believe. More than anything, it is down to inefficicent porting plan, and we could get away with that only because labour cost in China is dirt cheap.

Some used the term “port shops”, and I am starting to think that term is very suitable for us back then. Later, the team would shrink to a very small size as it move to developing an online version, that was a much more enjoyable time for me. As I was about to leave the company, people would tell me about tales of good porting plans carried out in other projects, alas, it was not to be for me to work on such projects.

Only Brand Sells

Some people claim that with the low cost of development and low barrier of entry, there would be more chance of innovation in gameplay. Unfortunately, only a fraction of people thinks so. The vast majority seize upon the low barrier of entry and set up mobile game factories, churning out clones after clones, and what makes it worst is these clones are all bad quality ones. The market developed to a state that branding matters over any thing else. Check out the April 2006 Mobile Games Java Download Chart for the UK region (via Mobile Game Developer)

1. SONIC THE HEDGEHOG – IFONE/SEGA
2. TETRIS – EA
3. THE SIMS 2 – EA
4. WORMS – THQ
5. BLOCK BREAKER DELUXE – GAMELOFT
6. ICE AGE 2: ARCTIC SLIDE – GLU MOBILE
7. MONOPOLY – GLU MOBILE
8. EA SPORTS FIFA 06 – EA
9. RONNIE O’SULLIVAN SNOOKER – PLAYER ONE
10. CHAMPIONSHIP MANAGER 2006 – EIDOS

As an attempt to milk the last ounce of respect I can get before leaving the company, (Ok, I already left) the only non-branded title out of the top ten list is Block Breaker Deluxe by Gameloft. I’m not saying all is hopeless, just good luck trying to make it big creating original games. Phil Steinmeyer wrote more on the business model.

More Time Creating, please

If you’re doing mobile game development, expect much of your time to be spent trying to overcome hardware problems. That memory leak of Nokia, virtual interrupts of Samsungs, slow image flipping on certain phones, that crash bug when you accept a phone call on SagemV76. That’s not to say overcoming hardware limitations is a bad thing, I am still sane enough to know that the game industry itself was born with pretty limited hardware. Except that in those earlier days, you design a game around those problems. In these days, you spend hours trying to dumb down a game to fit a puny phone. That, my friend, is not what I would call fun. Strip poker on a 96×65 resolution screen anyone? (hint:it sells) And if you’re expecting the future situation to be more pleasant, you would expect one of the new phones, Nokia N70 to be bug-free. I can tell you it’s not. Enough, I want to spend more time creating stuff!



-