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

[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.)