Ask HN: Cross platform game development? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Cross platform game development?

5 pointsPieSquared10 comments

I'm thinking of developing a game that would hopefully work on iPhone, Android, and from a web browser. What type of language or technology could be used? Is something like AppMobi (html5 development for web and mobile platforms) ready for production? What would you suggest? What good or bad experiences have you had with similar projects?

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I bought my ImpactJS license a few days back and it's very polished. I don't know if the $99 I paid was a bit high, but I'm satisfied with it. There's also a note on the ImpactJS site that it works well on iOS. It also comes with a beautiful level editor. But I'm not expert enough to judge if that's good enough for doing really big games. Indie game beginner here. Just tinkering with it.

There are a dozen of opensource javascript game engines that you could use. I've bookmarked a few javascript engines here http://pinboard.in/u:akash/t:gameengine Akihabara according to what I've heard, is the most stable out there, but the last time I tried, the documentation was lacking (although they do have a few tutorials which a lot of these gameengines don't have).

I'm mentioning javascript engines because you said you needed something cross platform including mobile. This way you could just just wrap the game with Adobe Air for desktop platforms and maybe native wrapper for mobile platforms. You might want to look into tools like Phonegap and Titanium

Impact is nice, but HTML5 still has 3 major issues in my opinion.

1) Sound doesn't work on every platform/browser but this is not impact's fault, it's html5.

2) Performance on android isn't good. It works ok in Opera, but not well the default browser.

3) In-browser multitouch on android is not available yet.

If you're looking for a 3D development platform, give http://unity3d.com/ a look. Been developing a 3D web/smart phone game for the last year. I've also seen people do some creative 2D games on that platform as well.

Unity is great and possibly the only 3D solution right now, but there are better options for 2D out there for lower cost.

They have native 2d support coming soon, and publish-to-Flash. It was all announced in Feb so it hopefully doesn't take much longer.

What 2d tools are you referring to?

While I don't have any experience on the subject, I did recently see an article about using HTML5 to make an offline compatible iPhone game: http://sixrevisions.com/web-development/html5-iphone-app/

And here's another article from IBM about offline web/mobile apps in a more general sense: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-offlineweb/...

Hopefully these can help you out in some way!

I'm no developer but I recently watched the ForPlay speech at Google I/O and it sounded promising:

http://code.google.com/p/forplay/

ForPlay is a cross-platform game abstraction library for writing games that compile to:

Desktop Java

HTML5 Browsers

Android

Flash

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_sbusEUz5w

Keep your eyes on toto games and their upcoming game maker studio. Read their "glog" for updates and video.

It might be helpful to mention what kind of game you're thinking of. Is it 3D? 2D? Puzzle? Zork 2011?

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