3 ms·

I looked into 2D engines for iOS a couple of years ago and I remember reading on one of their websites that I shouldn't worry about porting to other platforms b

I looked into 2D engines for iOS a couple of years ago and I remember reading on one of their websites that I shouldn't worry about porting to other platforms before the game has reached popularity. The context was probably Android and not PC, but still, this seems to be exactly what was going wrong here. If they would have chosen Unity (or any other cross-platform engine for that matter, e.g., Cocos2D-X) over Cocos2D-iPhone, there would be a PC version today. This seems to be a bit of a recurring thing where we evaluate technologies wrong very early and punish ourselves in the long run. The fact that Twitter once was a Rails app comes to mind. I can't recommend enough to write software for the best case scenario. You shouldn't have to replace your entire toolchain once the thing you dreamt about happening actually happens.

dageshi 12y ago
I kind of agree with their original thought, if the game can't succeed on one large platform then being portable is irrelevant. If it does succeed then porting is an additional cost but it's a cost you can weigh up and choose to do or not do, you have the choice. That seems like a better option than over encumbering yourself to begin with by adding in effect a bunch of additional cross platform requirements.
sehugg 12y ago
Hindsight is 20/20. It was 2011 when they ported the Flash version to iOS, so Cocos2D-X had just been forked and Unity had just released its Android version. Cocos2D was what all the hit games were using at the time. The game's popular enough that Activision did them the honor of cloning them for their recent Duck Dynasty game, so it's hard to say they screwed up that badly.
programminggeek 12y ago
Another way to look at it is that the requirements changed. When the requirement is multiplatform then you pick the best multiplatform solution, when the requirement is simply the best engine for a single platform, that's a totally different requirement. It's not that the picked the wrong tool for the job, it's that the job changed.
teamhappy 12y ago
I want to reply to all three of you, so I'm just gonna do it like that. sehugg kind of got a point, but I think there were really good cross-platform solutions available back then. Just not the ones used today. Marmalade has been around for a quite while and it was/is used by a lot of big studios. The other two comments I don't agree with. > It's not that the picked the wrong tool for the job, it's that the job changed. If your tool can't adapt to new requirements an argument can be made that you did in fact pick the wrong tool in the first place. That's my point exactly. > That seems like a better option than over encumbering yourself to begin with by adding in effect a bunch of additional cross platform requirements. I think this is a bit of an exaggeration. They don't write their own engine, so the overhead for going cross-platform is really, really small — so small that I have a hard time coming up with examples right now. Not hard coding screen sizes and that kind of thing might be one, but that's about it. There's also some irony in saying that's the better option given the blog post we're talking about.

dageshi 12y ago

I kind of agree with their original thought, if the game can't succeed on one large platform then being portable is irrelevant. If it does succeed then porting is an additional cost but it's a cost you can weigh up and choose to do or not do, you have the choice. That seems like a better option than over encumbering yourself to begin with by adding in effect a bunch of additional cross platform requirements.

sehugg 12y ago

Hindsight is 20/20. It was 2011 when they ported the Flash version to iOS, so Cocos2D-X had just been forked and Unity had just released its Android version. Cocos2D was what all the hit games were using at the time. The game's popular enough that Activision did them the honor of cloning them for their recent Duck Dynasty game, so it's hard to say they screwed up that badly.

programminggeek 12y ago

Another way to look at it is that the requirements changed. When the requirement is multiplatform then you pick the best multiplatform solution, when the requirement is simply the best engine for a single platform, that's a totally different requirement. It's not that the picked the wrong tool for the job, it's that the job changed.

teamhappy 12y ago

I want to reply to all three of you, so I'm just gonna do it like that. sehugg kind of got a point, but I think there were really good cross-platform solutions available back then. Just not the ones used today. Marmalade has been around for a quite while and it was/is used by a lot of big studios. The other two comments I don't agree with. > It's not that the picked the wrong tool for the job, it's that the job changed. If your tool can't adapt to new requirements an argument can be made that you did in fact pick the wrong tool in the first place. That's my point exactly. > That seems like a better option than over encumbering yourself to begin with by adding in effect a bunch of additional cross platform requirements. I think this is a bit of an exaggeration. They don't write their own engine, so the overhead for going cross-platform is really, really small — so small that I have a hard time coming up with examples right now. Not hard coding screen sizes and that kind of thing might be one, but that's about it. There's also some irony in saying that's the better option given the blog post we're talking about.