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

[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.