Porting to gaming platforms?
I am developing a fairly portable indie game engine as well as a "demo" game to go with that. In the future, I would like to make a more complete game for deployment on some different platforms. The details of the future game are less important, I am more into "how" than "what" - genre and content are not relevant to me.
So, which target platform would you recommend? And what cheap features (which shook a lot) have you successfully developed for this platform? Please pay attention to cost-effectiveness as my budget will not allow purchasing SDK with the price of 10K U $.
Edit: I'm really curious about the cheap features you've successfully developed for a specific platform. For instance. "I made this awesome two-finger-touch-input-control-method-for-a-retro-type-this-and-the-game for the iPod at the wrong time , and it rocked . I really recommend this platform / approach!"
a source to share
PC, Linux, Mac, Iphone, XNA for Xbox 360 and Nintendo DS and Sony PSP homebrew are very interesting targets. It's an interesting challenge to write an engine that can work for all of these purposes, but it's achievable.
If you get abstract enough that you can hit all of these goals by extending them to something commercial like say ... WiiWare won't be too big a deal in the future.
a source to share
Since your budget does not allow buying multi-thousand devices, your options are a little limited - Playstation, Wii and XBox own development are missing.
I would recommend Windows PC and XBox 360 using XNA Game Studio. XNA is free and runs on both of these platforms. He also has a good developer and there are many blogs and websites with information, tips and tricks, and samples. You can get started from http://creators.xna.com .
a source to share
It won't help you, but it's worth mentioning: World of Goo made a big splash and was released for Mac, Windows, Linux and even the Wii. They've presumably used something called the Experimental Gameplay Project , but it looks like it hasn't been released yet .
a source to share
If you would like to consider developing on Wii / PS / etc. consoles that Michael notes are probably out of your price range, consider homebrew development kits. They are not supported or supported, but because they work with technology, they can help you decide if you want to use these SDKs in the future.
I hope any project you start works well!
a source to share
I think the question of "what" is VERY important when choosing a platform, as the platform has a big impact on who will be exposed to your game and how it will play.
You are developing a game for several people sitting around a screen, for example. trivia game, fighting game, sports game, etc.? Then you probably want to look at a console like 360. Are you looking for something a little deeper? Dwarven Fortress, or the next great Hexagonal Wargame? You probably want to go to PC. Shooter? Something with the mouse. PC again. A flight simulator that requires thousands of different buttons? Something with a keyboard, like a computer again. Are you building a simple Popcap-style puzzle? you can look at the SDK for a kind of handheld device.
Tell us what you want to create and we can recommend the platform
edit: if it was me, PC would be my default platform no matter what
a source to share
If you want to develop for PC, can I suggest Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL)?
- It is a cross-platform (Linux, Windows, Mac (we need more games please!), BSD and others no one cares about) library for graphics development, especially for games.
- The best game of all time (at least in my opinion) was written with it.
- It's free and open source, but released under a permissive license, so you can do whatever you want with the code you write on top of it. You can even dig the insides of it and see how you can port it to a platform SDL doesn't support if you choose to.
a source to share