Why We Aren’t Developing For Ouya

This bothers me. I'm not above some criticism for Ouya[1], but let's at least keep it in realistic realms and in ways that can be used to improve the product. By the end of this, not only was I not convinced it was a failing of Ouya, even if I were, there was no indication of what Ouya could do better to fix it.

They assumed you'd use the controller to move a pointer around on the screen, instead of highlighting different buttons. Have they not played console games? I can think of only a handful of console games that have a free-form pointer, and it's only for the gameplay (the point-and-click adventure game and the ill-informed PC strategy game to console port): the menus outside of gameplay are still direction-driven.

Direction-driven, focus-based menus are very easy to build. You could go the very easy way with a state machine, or you could even hack your way through it with a bunch of counters and switch statements. To me, it actually fits easier into the framerate conscious style of programming for games much, much easier than a point-and-click interface, as you don't have to do any hit checking. Not that hit checking itself is very hard, either.

Regardless, the menu system should be abstracted enough from the game code that it wouldn't be an issue to rip it out completely and build a new one from scratch. My impression is that this is the real issue. It's not that direction-based menus are difficult to make, it's that it's difficult to make any sort of changes to the type of spaghetti code that game developers and mobile developers and small startup developers (God help us when they come in the same package) write when they naively assume they "don't have time" to write good code. This isn't limited to these fields, but these particular types of people tend to be the least matured into their programming.

But yeah, be the workman who blames his tools. It's Ouya's fault that you can't write the bare simplest menu style in the field of gaming.

[1] The wifi might be slow (I don't know if I have an interference problem yet) and some of the controller buttons get snagged on the inside edge of the faceplate if I press them too hard. The wifi might not be their fault and I can fix the faceplate on my own. Brand new hardware from a brand new company is going to have some rough edges (literally, in this case).