Game Devs Weigh In On Windows Phone 7 189
The mobile games industry has exploded over the past few years, driven largely by titles built for iOS and Android. The Guardian's games blog decided to investigate the pros and cons of Windows Phone 7 as a game development platform while it struggles to catch up to its predecessors.
"... the easy portability of code between WP7 and Xbox, plus the wealth of online tutorials, libraries and community support, is a massive advantage, especially for smaller and less experienced teams. ... As with Xbox Live Arcade, the console's downloadable games service, Windows Phone 7 offers a curated experience, which means Microsoft controls the quality of games appearing on the device. ... [Steven Batchelor-Manning of Nerf Games says,] 'The App Hub offers a good peer review system, where other developers are asked to check over your game. This helps filter out both low quality and bug-ridden titles. We are always given a particular quality to aim for. Once it's got past this stage there is also a chance that Microsoft will veto against your game going on the platform. Ultimately, this prevents the market being swamped, but above this, there seems to be a layer of games by big publishers (EA, etc) that just step past the smaller developers in the queue. This is the biggest drawback of the system.'"
Weird story (Score:5, Interesting)
To me the article read like a blatant fanboy story, but maybe I'm just jaded.
And then I got to this: "As with Xbox Live Arcade, however, Microsoft is set to run its own games promotions, to help market promising titles. The project kicks off this spring with a Must Have games season, which features six Windows Phone 7 titles, including Angry Birds, Doodle Jump, Hydro Thunder and Plants vs Zombies. "
Sure, those are promising titles - after all, they're already big hits on iOS and Android. But how the heck is this tied to the article's repeated meme regarding Windows/XBox-specific tools, and easy cross-development between XBox Live and WP7? It's certainly unlikely any of them were written in C#.
Re:Weird story (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now there are no known non-stock WP7 apps not written in .NET. That said, all of titles listed are not really big in terms of code, so I suspect that porting effort is not as big as one would think. There's also a way to have a shared codebase between .NET and mobile platforms that support C++, though you end up with a rather crippled language subset (basically like Java with no GC).
Re:All against MS? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have used Firebird (the OS incarnation of Paradox)
Firebird is an OSS fork of Interbase. It doesn't have anything to do with Paradox, aside from the fact that both Interbase and Paradox were owned by Borland.
Calling stored procedures in MS-SQL from any VisualStudio framework is a royal pain in the ass.
Out of curiosity, what do you find hard about it? (especially in comparison with other similar frameworks, say, JDBC)
Please don't construct this as an advertisement for WP7, I'm simply saying, maybe one should look at it before dismissing it out of hand.
Right now there are more problems with WP7 from user side than there are from developer side. Sure, you can write an app - but do you actually want the phone to run it on?
From dev perspective lack of C/C++ is a surprisingly big deal. On every other mobile platform, you can reuse existing C and C++ libraries as-is, and there are a lot of them. On WP7 it's .NET only, and even then it's not quite the same as desktop version, so there's no guarantee that your favorite library will work.
Re:I don't know about this whole "quality" thing (Score:4, Interesting)
You don't want your kid to be the cool kid?
Don't forget, the Wii has lots of games like "House of the Dead: Overkill" and "Madworld" and such. It's not all kiddie-friendly. It just isn't centered around frat-boy games.