Ports Ports Ports
By James on Tuesday 11 May 2010, 16:24 - Permalink
Ancient Frog currently runs on all of the devices in this picture, and a few more that happened not to be there when I was playing with my camera.
The iPad port is out and failing to set the world alight. It did pretty well in its first week, getting featured by Apple. But featured on the iPad in launch week turns out to fall a long way short of featuring on the iPhone, and when the week was up, it didn't have any momentum.
The Palm Prē version is out too. I really enjoyed doing that one - I discovered at GDC that Palm was opening up native development, got a Prē straight away, and had something running in a couple of days. It's essentially the Windows build in its iPhone-sized debugging configuration, with the OpenGL ES code and textures from the iPhone version. Wonderfully painless, and with the crisper screen, and the river-polished-stone feel of the Prē, it's beautiful. My favourite version so far. It takes a while for the sales figures to come through from Palm, so I don't really know how it's doing yet - but it doesn't need to do anything spectacular to justify the effort.
The Android port is still rumbling along. I have something that runs well on the Nexus One, although it lacks sound, there are some situations where it fails to recreate textures correctly, and the levels all need redoing (again). (This time they need to be higher res and aspect-ratio agnostic versions of the original iPhone levels - the iPad versions only make sense on a physically larger screen). The textures also can't be compressed, because there's no standard GPU on Android devices, and there's a silly restriction on how much data you can fit in internal storage. So lots of bitty work to get it to run reliably on a decent cross section of the various devices out there, and still no way to charge money for it from New Zealand. I keep picking away at it because at some point it'll probably be worth the pain to nail all of the remaining problems.
The desktop version, OS-X and Windows. I keep flip-flopping on this. I'm just not sure what sort of market there is for a game like Ancient Frog on the desktop. The App Store has lowered everyone's price expectations, and I don't think I'd be able to sell nearly enough copies at $5-ish to be worth the support hassles of getting it running on decade-old malware-ridden boxes.
The netbook version. This is basically the desktop version, but with Intel handling some of the config testing woes, and the possibility of prizes in their competition, I'm tipped in favour of it.
With all of this stuff, Ancient Frog continues to take up a couple of days a week of my time. The rest of the time I'm working on two new game prototypes, hoping to get one of them to a critical point where I can announce it and go all in on it.
Comments
Nice one - good tip on the native coding on the pre. I would bet that the Android version would eventually actually be the most useful long term. It is also, I reckon, the most ARSE of all to port for.
The different aspect ratio + resolution problem remains another top top hate of mine too.
I bought the pre app.
It looks beautiful, the sound track is perfect...it's almost a zen-like experience! We don't have that many apps on the palm pre so it's great when we get decent ones.
Thanks for taking the trouble to port it over.
I can't believe nobody's commenting in your blog. Could you please elaborate bit more on how you conceived the Ancient Frog?
I was always curious is it original concept or you got this idea from somewhere? And how does skeleton works, are there some artificial restrictions which doesn't allow me to move frog limbs or everything is completely natural?
I was always facinated by iPhone version. Gotta say that iPad looks bit worse I think, the frog is not that lively anymore and everything looks bit plastic. But anyway cool game, would like to know more about how did you develop it.
Thank you.
As far as I know, the game is original. I'm not aware of anything similar, at any rate.
The skeleton of the frog has a set of rigid bones, constrained by ligaments which limit how far they can rotate with respect to each other. It's not based on any real biology, but rather on what looked about right while providing a set of constraints that gave rise to interesting puzzles.