I would like to ask a few questions regarding mobile game porting...
Let say if I have a simple 2D C++ game engine and have a PC game based on that engine and I want to port it to different mobile platforms BREW, J2ME, iPhone, Android, Symbian, etc..
Do I need to re-code the engine and the game for each platform? or is there an easier and more efficient way? I am sure the process is complicated since different phones have different graphic/processor/memory/etc. I am just curious about the overview of mobile game porting process. :)
Thanks!
There are several ways of attacking mobile game porting. First of all, until very recently it was mostly BREW and J2ME. The iPhone, Android and BlackBerry are changing this landscape and making the impossible task of mobile game porting even more impossible. I worked in 3rd party mobile game development for many years until recently. I watched BREW vanish and saw publishers completely focus on J2ME as the cost of porting is strangling the industry. There are estimates to its cost, both time and money, and it seems to bell curve around 50-60% of the total development cost for each game is just porting.
At our company, we handled porting by having two engines that paralleled each other, one in BREW, one in J2ME. We never supported Symbian as Symbian development does not make any money. It is mainly for high-end tech demos that might be on one or two devices, nothing that could reach the mass market. Plus, most Symbian phones supported J2ME.
We would be required by publishers to provide any where from 7-23 reference builds of the game, targeting many different devices, in both BREW and J2ME. Just before moving on, publishers were also starting to require a J2ME touch screen reference version, and an iPhone SKU was being left as "to be determined" based on the final product and how cost effective an iPhone version would be at that time. The reference versions would then be passed on to a porting house to translate the different references to the thousands of other required SKUs.
Companies like Gameloft still brute force their way through porting. That's why Gameloft's games are constantly at a higher quality than the rest of the industry. However, it is just not possible for smaller companies to attack the problem this way due to costs. Not everyone can afford an office in Beijing with 5000 developers.
There are many companies out there developing engines to cut porting costs. Mobile-Distillery is one I was in contact with quite a lot, but we ended up never using it. So, I can't vouch for them. The problem here is that you will be at the mercy of another companies engine. Performance could be problematic due to the fact that it is being built to target thousands of SKUs. Plus, you really have little control over the low level implementation of your game in this instance. The end result seems to be a game that targets the lowest common denominator of phones.
Finally, a lot of developers are just abandoning the idea of supporting all mobile platforms. There is a huge flood on games on the iPhone because 1) it requires only targeting one platform and 2) there is a 70 percent profit share through the AppStore for developers. Through carrier releases, the percentage is not even comparable.