Game Maker Games on Android?
October 14, 2010
A recent topic at the Game Maker Community asks whether “Yoyogames had put any thought into developing a port for Android”. Thought, definitely. Work, no idea.
After iOS Android is the next logical step, and YoYo Games aren’t exactly hiding their intentions.
- In a tweet from his now deleted Twitter account Sandy Duncan wrote “If we can get it to work on iPhone, then Android will be a quick port”. (Jan 2010)
- In GMIndie’s second podcast (May 2010) Sandy mentioned the possibilities of getting Game Maker games to run on Android, iPhone and also Windows 7 Mobile.
- Sandy Duncan’s LinkedIn profile contains the following sentence: “We have now begun to roll out an aggressive strategy to become the World’s most prolific publisher of Handheld Games, focusing on PSP, iPhone and Android based devices.”
In the second quarter of this year sales of Android based phones outstripped the figure for Apple devices.
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I don’t know much about the phones, but at least with gaming-dedicated devices, doesn’t DS pretty much dominate PSP in software sales? And so if you’re intent is really to become THE most prolific publisher of handheld games, you’d have to move into DS eventually?
I mean, I realize this is all useless speculation, and, depending on the numbers, the phone market may make up for that, but it’s something to think about, right?
Sandy I believe said that the DS is impossible for Game Maker due to hardware constraints. Something to do with the lack of RAM. However, the 3DS looks far more powerful than the DS, so maybe we’ll see it in the future.
http://gamemakerblog.com/2010/09/22/ds-game-maker-5-ide-interface-looks-familiar/
”We have now begun to roll out an aggressive strategy to become the World’s most prolific publisher of Handheld Games, focusing on PSP, iPhone and Android based devices.”
That’s a bold statement. I had no idea that they were aiming so high. I hope they can make good on it.
As for Android, PC Pro just posted a story about TweetDeck’s struggles with it. They reportedly encountered 244 different handsets running 100+ different versions of Android. Sounds like a nightmare. Top that with the fact that Android users don’t spend anywhere near the amount of money on apps as iPhone users and it doesn’t seem like a very attractive platform for developers. More available platforms is always good, but Android fragmentation reminds me of the horrible pre-DirectX days of PC development.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/enterprise/361948/developers-battle-with-over-100-different-versions-of-android
Heh, you don’t think these issues have come about in native Android development? Fragmentation of devices is considered a growing problem, but Google have taken steps to prevent it. For example, they’ve categorized screen sizes and made it available to code for individual sizes.
How much of this can be converted to Game Maker, however, is debatable.
Source:
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/10/support-for-additional-screen.html
I compleatly agree with you. Also, I have an Android phone at the moment and love it. If Game Maker was created for Android that would be FANTASTIC even if it wasn’t compatible with EVERY SINGLE Android version.
Agreed. Unlike PSP/iOS the specs of each device will be different (screen size, processing power etc). I have heard that some Android apps are not compatible on phones with smaller screens so there appears to be an extra level of complexity if Android is not able to deal with this itself.
You do then start to run into screen issues, with the various phones having different size screens. That could make things more difficult, unless you just focus on one product, like the Droid.
Still, it will widen the market.
-Elmernite