The Development Platform

In order to meet our constraints, we have the following requirements for our theoretical casual games development platform:

By Scott Bilas, Oberon Media, Inc. - The executable code must be small. After we subtract the space needed for the installer and DRM wrapper (sadly, this can be a megabyte or more), the audio, and the art, we don't have much left. Forget about bloated C++ template libraries and big third-party DLL's. It's even worse on the Mac due to the fatter PPC instruction set (fortunately, Mac users are on broadband more often than Windows users).

- The content must be small. We can't get away with PNG's and BMP's and WAV's. We've got to store our content in JPG's or JP2's and MP3's or OGG's.

- We've got to grab players' attention. We want to be able to build and integrate visuals that "pop" without having a programmer get involved, sequencing complicated animations by hand.

- The engine needs to avoid fancy API's that probably don't exist on the client machines. Nobody is going to have DirectX 9 installed, or the .NET Framework, or the right GDI+, or know how/want to download and install them. We'll be lucky if they have a recent version of shfolder.dll. They'll have ancient hardware drivers. And don't even think of dropping support for Win98! (Win95 is apparently ok to drop, though, according to our stats.)

- Performance is a huge concern. Many of our players' systems will have old CPU's and minimal memory. They'll be riddled with spyware and viruses, which makes the CPU and memory problem even worse. This engine must be tight, efficient, and fast.

- The toolset needs to support rapid iteration. Wasting a day of time could be one or two percent of the entire production schedule! So we'll need a scripting language, a good layout and animation tool, a flexible object model, and try to data-drive it all.

- We're going to want to make a web version of the game as a teaser. So we need to have a route to the web that doesn't involve contracting out an expensive rewrite in Java or Flash.

So what about Flash? Can we really make games with it?
What is Flash? >>>

 

 

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