Hey all!
I’ve been a bit busy lately, finishing up a project for work that kind of consumed all my life, except World of Warcraft (yay, killed Shannox, got a Eternal Ember!!).
Anyway, I’ve been working on the port of Spellbook onto the Marmalade framework (so I can use it in future mobile games). Also been talking a lot about mobile games and some of the ex-members of Spellcaster Studios decided to do some experimental games on those platforms..
I’ve never been much of a “mobile gamer”, most of my knowledge of games on mobile platforms being from mainstream websites (so I only know the more famous titles, and most of those seem to resemble Flash games anyway), so I decided to check out what’s out what’s there.
I’ve looked around and I found Touch Arcade, which is a site dedicated to iPhone games… although my target will probably be iOS, Android and Windows7 phones, it’s still a good place to start, and I found some stuff there that was quite interesting, specially from a technical standpoint:
So, not all mobile games must look like Flash games, and some of them have quite interesting graphics, from a technical standpoint…
For the record, I knew there were games on the iPhone that didn’t look like Flash games, but most of them actually do… it’s refreshing to see something that escapes from that normalized graphical look.
Anyway, in the next weeks I hope to be able to find the time to port Spellbook onto Marmalade and get some simple games up and running!
This is the current state of the port:
This doesn’t look impressive (specially with such a blurry photo), but it shows the blitting system working (without textures yet, need to add a DDS loader), with a fixed function pipeline shader that gets translated from my own engine structures (similar to DirectX) to OpenGL ES. This shader is read through my resource manager, from a file in my own format. The blit system used my mesh system, so that’s a double victory. Projections (in this case orthogonal) are also handled by my system.
This wouldn’t be a big achievement for anybody but me, since I’ve never worked in any depth with OpenGL, let alone OpenGL ES, and my engine is all DirectX based…