Cross Platform Mobile Development
As Epiphany Games wants to give players an experience in a variety of platforms; one world but many ways of interacting with it, I thought I would take the time to make some points about tools that can assist our vision and bring that experience to multiple platforms. I’ll also talk about how those tools help our projects which are not in the same setting; some of which are revenue sources for our company.
Our goal of cross-platform games requires us to have a higher level of understanding and deeper level of integration than many other companies. We have pushed out many games this year and last year on iPhone and Android; before that we were developing engine technology to enhance our ability to make the games we wanted to make. Early on, we found that to enable a certain level of cross platform development C++ was the language that gave us the most bang for our buck. We have a strong team, well versed in C++ from Frozen Hearth and GameBryo development. Frozen Hearth uses a combination of C++, C#, and LUA script. Our mobile title ‘Runic Rumble’ uses C# almost exclusively because of the engine choice; I would have liked to have the development in C++, but the project was too far along and we decided to stick with C# on Unity.
At Epiphany we also develop many mobile games for companies in Australia and Japan, and on these projects we tend to use C++ to get the project done in a tight deadline. This month we developed three games in two weeks to an Alpha stage using a very small mobile team. These games functioned on both iPhones and Android phones and were skinned with different themes for different levels. Using an objective-C wrapper or a Java Wrapper on the different platforms allowed us to release the games at the same time on the different platforms. When we partnered with Flat Earth Games, and we are using the same cross platform techniques in this development and I think it will help us a great deal. The project is really cool and we are making some great progress, and I think our approach is going to help Flat Earth Games and ourselves get the game out to a variety of platforms and market places. The next step for us is to take some of our free games and our paid Android games to the various market places; we use is a company called Codengo to deal with the plethora of mobile stores. For the App Store we must still submit ourselves.
One of the hardest and most time consuming components of mobile development is submitting your game to a store for review and then tracking the results across stores and sectors, there are many stores that game developers never even think of like the Samsung store. Codengo is a new distribution service that puts the mobile submission and tracking of games in the hands of the developer, for a small fee and no percentage of the games revenue Codengo will submit your game to over ten stores, Google Play, Samsung and others. The service can track the results consolidate the marketing material and within a few clicks your game is submitted across the world to a variety of market places. Codengo isn’t free; however the benefits of a one-service submission will be attractive to cross platform developers who distribute in multiple markets.
By using this cross-platform approach we hope to service our customers on both platforms, in a variety of market places, and enable them to experience our games in a variety of ways. I really think this cross-platform approach services our customers better because we can give them a variety of experiences on multiple platforms. It’s imperative that all Australian Game developers look at how they are dealing with multiple platforms because the need is never going to disappear.