I've got a job with a mobile phone app company now. Finally figured out how to make some basic stuff, thinking of working into games. Learning and doing stuff is more fun as a group, so wondering if anyone wants to do this with me as well? And it's easier when everyone can share cool resources that they find or ask noob questions to each other.
Phone games look way easier to make than classical C++ games, something like VB, but with a much easier to use language.
Thinking Android is a good place to start. The Android emulators are very good, almost exactly the real thing. Plus it's really easy to get your stuff onto the Google Market, and people there are not as snobby as iOS users, not too picky with quality.
It's not really that hard to learn, tutorials and programming tools today are very good, just need a bit of time.
Very good Java tutorial (better than many colleges):
http://www.wibit.net/
(Would recommend you start from the beginning if you don't know a thing about programming, though)
Really fun text editor:
http://www.sublimetext.com/
(Eclipse is about as good, but I love the syntax highlighting and the feel of this one)
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
Personally, with the quality of basic programming tools, I find that classic programming is a lot easier/less buggy than using MMF, easier to learn too. MMF is ok for simple things and great for platformers, but make a game advanced enough and some undocumented bug pops up which needs a long, buggy workaround.
Like I've only been learning Android since starting this thread and I've already made a browser that can open sites from QR codes.
Also how well does MMF handle things like screen tilting and sliding? They're as important to touchphone games as right-clicks and WASD are to PC games.
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
Muz learns Android well posting on line. On the week ends he likes to quickly learn who to speak chinese, and he enjoys long walks on the beach and builting nucluar reactors. lol
@ Muz, I hope you don't mind the picking at you. But I'm just saying. Your a smart guy. Half the things you say fly right over my head.
Some eight years ago I might have joined you Muz, well joined, I would ride the same adventurous road and we could share are thoughts. But nowadays I am waiting for smartphones with decent javascript engines that will support html5 gaming on the phone. So there is no need for an iOS, Android, WPhone app or windows, osx, linux exe build. Or even a flash version.
I think you're right about Android and publishing on the Google Market (is it Play now?) store. However keep in mind that Android devices are like windows computers, they came in all shapes and sizes with different features for every one of them. The iOS devices don't have that many different featuresets. So your game tested with your iPhone 4 should run equally well on all the other ones. But testing with a Galaxy S III and then running your game on some other Android device ... you can't be sure how well that works.
Coding is probably just as easy on both and I think publishing too. Native code will run faster than html5 games with javascript, that's why I am waiting on those budget smartphones with decently fast javascript engines.
Meanwhile I'll just keep on coding in html5 with javascript and canvas. Because I think it's rather easy too and works on almost every device, albeit sometimes slow on smartphones.
Haha, I actually did learn Android since posting this. Even got paid to do an app for a 5 star hotel, it's on Google Play now
I did do HTML5 for a while before this. It's a lot slower and a lot uglier, which is why I switched to programming in Android.
The issues you say about different shapes and sizes for Android devices applies even more so for HTML5 things. At least with native Android, it's designed to cater for that. I had some trouble with a bug that only happens on Android 2.3 (really specific lol) but not on some browsers like Opera.
Also yeah, it's really, really annoying to do for multiple different devices, but at least right now all Android phones are being designed to look like the Samsung Nexus, Note (2), or S3. And most phones in the future will be on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and above, so it's starting to get standardized. But you just can't design code in such a way to use pixels. At least with Windows, you can decide on resolution and do accurate trigonometry based on pixels.
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
Well Muz, I have a good puzzle game concept which I think would ideally suit an iPhone (was mentioned in another post). I have a short demo I could send you if vaguely interested. Dave S.
Sure, I could have a look (but dont have an iphone)
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
Oh hey. This thread. So I've been doing Android programming for a year and a half now. Getting jobs from multinational companies, utilities companies, and telcos. It's nice to look back and see humble beginnings. Glad I didn't go the MMF route on this.
And apparently I completely forgot to reply to Dave's mail apparently :x
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
Performance is a really big one. It's an entirely different operating system. I can see it translating well to Win 8, but not Android. For example, it's not really designed to open multiple files. Using the built in SQLite databases works far better than making do with INI or arrays.
There's your activity cycles. Multitasking works differently than in Windows. Minimized apps don't slow the phone down at all because they don't run in the background, unlike with Windows where you always want to close things.
You can maybe make games in MMF, but how do you make it so that the phone calls a number when you click a button? Make it share your score on Facebook? Copy paste by dragging your finger across text? Take a picture of the user and email it silently? Get the phone number, the unique ID of the user? Handle transactions through Google wallet with a single click? I've never tried it in MMF, but all these things take less than 2 hours to do in the ADK.
And it actually takes a lot longer to program in MMF than with the ADK. Click is... awkward. No constants. No functions. Coding in Java is actually really easy. You build your buttons. You have your events that happen when the button is clicked. No need to crawl through event lists or a giant tickbox in the event editor.
Android has a lot of stuff built in to perfection. Swiping to change tabs. Efficient dialog boxes. Full screen lists and scrolling. You'll need custom stuff for all of this if you intend to build apps in MMF. Games are a little better because everything is custom.
Also there's maintainability. Most people are going to buy the source code as well. There's a lot more native Android programmers than MMF programmers.
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
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