He's right on the money for a good chunk of it:
I spent a while thinking about what would actually make a good game for the platform, which is a very different design space than PCs or consoles.
Very true. You really can't simply think of, say, a cellphone as just a "tiny PC". As he said, the screen is smaller, the processor is slower, the memory is tighter, and the input controls is pretty lousy for action games.
What he doesn't point out is that the fundamental role of the thing as an entertainment device is often much different. People
generally expect games that are suited for play in short "spurts" (while waiting for a bus, or for a meeting/class to start, etc.), and that can be interrupted and returned to (and looked up from temporarily while it's still running) with little damage to the gaming experience. Not only is it not as capable as a PS2, people don't really even use it in the same way, under the same circumstances.
I started my "mobile programming life" on the Palm (it was "Pilot" back then), and that's what the general consensus wound up being. Puzzle games, turn-based RPGs, card games, quiz games, and that sort of thing translated a lot better than full-on action games. I'd say that's even more true for cellphones, owing to the poor controller and smaller screen.
And, of course, the other caveat with cellphone programming is the trade-off between portability and sophistication. That's just a fact of life, and that goes for a lot of other cross-platform things (like web page design).
Anyway, I don't know exactly what sort of game he wound up doing, but it sounds like, despite his own admission that it's a different design space, he still came up with something ill-suited for a J2ME game.
Is the JVM slow? Maybe. But that's his fault for designing a game that needed a fast JVM.
Is it a pain having to tweak 100 different versions to run on all the different cellphones? Sure. But again, that's his fault for not designing the game to a lower common-denominator. I guess he's used to mono-platform programming, and it's a big paradigm shift when you move to something like this, where you have no clue what hardware it will wind up on.
Personally, I sort of perversely enjoy these limitations.
- Jeff
[ March 30, 2005: Message edited by: Jeff Jetton ]
[ March 30, 2005: Message edited by: Jeff Jetton ]
