For a year or more now, I’ve been working on a Star Control 2 like game (inspired by rather than clone), which was originally targeting iPad and iPhone. The trouble is… procedural planets etc, are quite hard to achieve on these devices. Shader complexity for anything beyond basic lighting is slow and well… basically I’m now considering ditching mobile as a platform and switching instead to PC/Mac.
I wonder if anyone has any thoughts/opinions. Strong or controversial opinions welcome.
Thanks
Mike @runonthespot
Developing a small game myself, we target tablet devices atm first, as we think the game will be much more enjoyable on tablets than on mobile.
For us tablets offer a good compromise of performance and screensize. While developing assets for tablets, it will later be easy to reduce the size for mobile or to make them available for desktop (with small modifications).
But overall I think this decission is mainly influenced by the type of game you make. For Star Control 2 I would say mobile and tablets would perform good and it would be easy to switch later to desktop. Better start low, as getting high with effects is always easier than way around ^^
A friend of mine recently pointed out to me that on the App store, you’re competing with 400,000 (or whatever) other apps, with no easy way to become visible- on PC/Mac, you can set up your own store, or go the Steam route, and the PC games market is still huge. Hard not to agree. If FTL had appeared silently on the app store, would anyone have given it even a second look?
I’m a fan of the idea of tablet gaming but I’ve also been quite disappointed by how underpowered even iPad 2/3 are.
Is the struggle to get something running well on iPad (often even as old as iPad 1 needs some support) worth it?
I ask, because while there are still plenty of success stories of iphone games, I don’t see many on the forums talking about great sales from iPad ventures. Android tablets seem like a whole world of hurt too.
Both the app store and windows have a humongous amount of games to compete with, both require work and/or luck to become noticed.
If you’re having difficulties running certain effects on iOS… have you considered turning them down/off? Sure, it would be nice to have 'em - but if you can’t support 'em then your competition probably can’t support 'em so what have you lost? Going on PC may allow these features, but you’re also competing against bigger fish.
Well, in my case, i’m trying to produce procedural planet textures. I keep hitting barriers. I found a decent shader that does a cheap trick with prerendered noise textures but is flat out too slow for iPad. I’ve tried using libnoise to generate textures, but anything larger than 512x512 takes too long and then takes an age to actually Apply(). It’s quite frustrating. The shader has been the closest I’ve come to success thus far.
It’s not just a case of switching off specular or toning down image effects or something simple like that I’m afraid!
I am assume you are talking about Dark Quadrant? Too bad you’re having difficulty. A lot of us have been waiting for that one! If the game is involved enough, I would opt for PC. Mac, still doesn’t have a strong grip on a gaming market, except in the mobile platform medium.
If the game is involved enough, I would opt for PC. Mac, still doesn’t have a strong grip on a gaming market, except in the mobile platform medium.