I'm losing my favourite game

[venta]

I don't post about work here much. But just for once...

I work for a company that's been building a cross-mobile (and indeed cross-device, should you wish to play games on an internet-enabled telly or a high-powered toaster) platform for casual games. And our game store is now up and running:

www.antixgames.com

This is what our marketing department is calling a "soft launch", which appears to mean largely un-publicised. We support only a couple of phones[*] at the moment, and don't have a large range of games. But if you're willing to install a plug-in, you can pop along and try the games out in your (Windows) web browser.

Those of you who've heard me on the topic of work recently will instantly identify the actual bits I've actually been involved with :)

[*] Number of phones our software runs on: big. Number of phones our software runs on which have been properly tested and exhaustively verified and can be considered market quality: small.

Comments

[ebee.livejournal.com]

There are 6 types of Chess! eeeeeeeek!
I've pinged the link to brownbrother21

[venta.livejournal.com]

There are 6 types of Chess!

[SFX: stony silence]

Do you think I don't know this?

;)

Is brownbrother21 A?

[ebee.livejournal.com]

*giggles quietly* I didn't know there WERE that many, let alone you had to suffer through them!

Yep, A.

[venta.livejournal.com]

There are more.

Please note I don't say how good any of them are.

[ebee.livejournal.com]

Jeez...no wonder you hate them!

[venta.livejournal.com]

To be fair, I hated chess before I started. This experience merely hasn't helped :)

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

I think it's so that developer can sell mostly-the-same-game to you six times over ;)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Technically, it's so that a small, struggling start-up company can launch its store without looking like it's got bugger-all games ;)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Woohoo! I had an out of my the box experience!

Round of applause to the team!

Is there a developer info page anywhere? What languages are available if I want to port to (or develop for) Antix?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Woohoo!

Yay! I passed on your applause :)

Is there a developer info page anywhere? What languages are available if I want to port to (or develop for) Antix?

I reckon you'd be wanting

https://developer.antixlabs.com/

for which you have to register.

http://antixlabs.com/products/antixGameDevelopmentKit.html

contains a sort of marketingised version of what was once genuine information. C/C++ is the short answer, though :)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

C/C++ is the short answer, though :)

Ugh! <sadface>

With Unity running on Android and iOS now that's really not very tempting.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Um, explain to be me in short words? I saw your post about Unity the other day but didn't really investigate what it was - I thought it was an engine (that could conceivably be ported). You're telling me it's a language?

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

No, it's a development environment.

But the thing is it's very hard to justify developing a game in a language like C++ when I could be using a modern language like C#, ECMAScript or whatever and get the same work done in 1/10 of the time.

Historically all the good languages used to be slow, but this just isn't the case anymore.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ironically, I know remarkably little about actual game development, so can't really make sensible comments. I presume more stuff will be added as/when games developers start making noises about it (which, as far as I'm aware, they haven't yet)(or not to our faces :).

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Thinking about your porting comment, I think the answer may sort-of be "yes, it could be ported".

It's not open source though, so the porting would have to be done by Unity themselves, which might be hard to motivate.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Our Esteemed Head of Engineering (ald) tells me that we are actively engaged in making the list of supported languages longer and friendlier :)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Hurrah! :-)

[pm215]

Historically all the good languages used to be slow, but this just isn't the case anymore.

Is this true on random mobile platforms or just for x86? (ie, how many of these things have decent optimised backends for ARM or MIPS or whatever...) In-browser javascript should be OK, move further out of the mainstream than that and I suspect you might start to have difficulty.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Unity runs fine on iPhone. It JIT-compiles its Javascript variant, resulting in speeds only about 50% slower than C++ (allegedly - but seems plausible based on reports from developers).

Perhaps more importantly, these sorts of games place a much heavier load on system graphics calls and on the hardware than on code written by the developer. Making your code twice as fast doesn't make your game twice as fast, but making it take ten times longer to develop does make it ten times more expensive.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

(Unity supports C#, Javascript and a dialect of Python IIRC.)

[ulfilias.livejournal.com]

I haz the Desire. I am supported.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ooh. Does it go, sir? Does it?

[ulfilias.livejournal.com]

Well i downloaded the game player app and that runs. Not tried an actual game. Bit peeved on the 1meg space overhead the player requires and it doesn't allow for shifting to the memory card. That won't win it any favours !

[ulfilias.livejournal.com]

Zoocube worked....One of the smaller ones and i managed to max out the trial on my first go. Not that i was exactly sure of what i was doing, i really should have read the instructions !

[venta.livejournal.com]

:)

Games go on the SD card (I think), which Android DRM'd games don't (I think). So you can get as many games as you want for your 1meg of storage instead of it adding up for each game...

[ulfilias.livejournal.com]

Yep. Does look like the game itself is on the SD card. There are quite a few apps that are paranoid, a few that need to be on the main memory and some that are just lazy.

Most the games being larger items are mostly on the SD card (there is an overheard so even mostly on the sd card it means there is 100-200k on the phone).

Would be a useful thing to point out to the development people to have a look at moving it onto the card ?

[venta.livejournal.com]

It was looked at some time ago, but isn't easy. There are problems to do with secure storage, I think (though I may be wrong, as I've had very little to do with the Android porting).

I think it's due to be looked at again, but it's not very high priority at present.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Also, apparently you can replay the trial as many times as you want... up to the time limit.

Which was news to me, it allowed to you try out the first three levels last time I interacted with it!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Isn't that kind of normal? Skype is 10meg and won't let you shift it!

[beckyl.livejournal.com]

Cardigans, My favourite game, but I can't have a kudo because I had to look up the artist. Which at least means I now know who sings it.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, you can have half a kudo for knowing the song and for bothering :)

Was very briefly confused, there, as I was assuming you'd been looking at the website and was thinking "but we don't have a game called Cardigans..."

Maybe we should. It could be a knitting sim, or something. "Congratulations, you have now unlocked the left-handed triple-twist cable stitch"...

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

Damn, I knew the artist without looking them up, but you got here first. May I have the other half a kudo, ms venta?

It was used to most excellent effect by the f1 coverage back around the turn of the century, over a montage of Schumacher and others crashing out IIRC.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I've just realised: I thought it was Garbage anyway :)

You may have the remaining half kudo.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

Glad to see cross-platform, especially for mobiles (as opposed to the usual "Let's support IPhone ... and maybe this new Android thing, that's everyone right?")

I've already seen (though not played) Toonwarz for Symbian phones, I don't know if that means they're shipping on the untested platforms already, or it's been ported to your game engine.

I tried out the browser plug in and it works fine in Opera. I was curious to see if "Four In a Line" really was just four in a line. Honestly, if there's money to be made writing stuff like that, I'm in the wrong industry. I even see they have a Windows PC version for £11.75 (surely on the desktop, there's even more competition from loads of free versions). I do love the long-winded description they give - I never knew the history of "four in a line" was so rich! Not to mention their extensive feature list that lists things like "help file" :)

(No reflection on your company or game engine - I realise this is a separate developer.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

I've already seen (though not played) Toonwarz for Symbian phones, I don't know if that means they're shipping on the untested platforms already, or it's been ported to your game engine.

If it's on a Symbian phone, then I imagine it's running native there. It was subsequently ported to our platform.

Four in a line

Like I said above, the policy at the moment is to try and look well-populated. Quality will take longer. I'm not sure we expect to *sell* any of these!

(Actually, as it happens, it's only technically a separate developer. They supplied the engines, all the actual GUI stuff has been done by me. Purely to get the numbers up!)

I have been staggered recently by the amount some developers think they can charge for games - and also the huge variety in pricing. You can buy a branded Tetris on an iPhone for some small sum, but on my 2-3 yr old Sony Ericsson it's £5.95! I'd have bought it if it'd been a couple of quid, but am now avoiding it on principle.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure we expect to *sell* any of these!

Where by "these" I mean the board-game-a-likes. Some of the other games are fun. I've played a lot of ZooCube under the guise of testing :)

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

Ah right, I was confused by AI Factory also having the product for PC and assumed it was entirely their work. It makes sense as having it as a showcase. No criticism on the GUI, it looks very nice :) I was just curious whether a separate company was making money from such games or not. And I agree that the non-board-games on there seem to offer more.

Yes, it does seem to be that on mobiles it's still possible to charge for even trivial things (though it wasn't too long ago we had even ringtones selling for several pounds, I don't know if that still happens). Perhaps part of the problem is that even if free equivalents exist, it can be harder to search them out (people may just go with whatever floats to the top of the app store rankings). Possibly also not helped in that the app stores make it very easy for developers to charge, so it must be tempting to think "why not try selling it".

[venta.livejournal.com]

AI Factory made the engine. They do also sell the game, including that one for PC you linked to. The game on our store, though, is our version using their engine.

Where by "sell" I do admittedly mean "offer for sale". Even allowing the effects you mention, I'd be truly staggered if anyone wanted to pay £12 for a PC version of an OEM Connect4!

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Don't run Windows, don't have an HTC Desire or a Commtiva N700.

Still, some of the game icons look quite pretty!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Really? What browser are you using? (and what OS? Linux?)

I have expected it to work in-browser. Though it does says "Windows" on the site. How odd.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Oh no. Apparently it doesn't. Shows how much I know. Just Windows atm.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Woohoo! Not going to try anything atm as it looks like will be highly distracting and I'm supposed to be working on a tight deadline. But good luck!

[venta.livejournal.com]

looks like will be highly distracting

I do hope so!

[davefish.livejournal.com]

I mis-read the URL as anti xgames.
I liked the idea that they were particularly un-extreme games.

:)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, there this:

http://www.antixgames.com/en/game/drift-away

... surely the most unextreme game ever :)

(Quite peaceful, though!)

[davefish.livejournal.com]

Definitely not too gnarly.

[pm215]

Fact: I was at the Meego conference this week, and one of the booths there had some sort of set top box with a menu including a couple of games with the Antix logo on :-)