Indie-Resource.com

So I have noticed very few "good" RPGs for tablets or phone. I have a Galaxy 3 and have download a TON of RPGs and they all are terrible. I thought it might be interesting to build one for tablets in general. I went out and bought me a Galaxy Tab 2 about 30 minutes ago. Love it so far but I want a good RPG for it!

Anyone worked on developing for tablets in general?

I've developed android, and Iphone apps, however when it came to creating a full game on a tablet(Ipad) I found it much less fun. Because they are now very capable computers in their own right you can create great gameplay and to a very high standard for example the GTA games are now available where as ten years ago I had snake on my phone. This however presents us with a lot of facts, more development time, planning, testing... just seemed way to much for me on one platform.

My opinion; well smaller games can be fun it makes much more sense to focus them to be phone compatible first. In my experience people like games on their mobile for odd free 5 minutes. Well this may not seem restricting if you look at the power of the Ipad next to the Iphone you will see it is. Larger games make more sense in my mind as web based applications, and having a mobile theme or a smaller app linked to them to allow you to check mail updates etc...

This is only my opinion my mind you, and is influenced by how and what I normally develop.

Tablets are still selling like hot cakes and it si nice to see games developed for them. Larger screen and such. I really think the ideal program is HTML5 where you can play it on tablet, Web, or phone without download. The only draw back is you need internet access.

I tried working with mobile for a bit. I quickly lost interest in native mobile development (you just feel like you are doing way more work than needed for the results with OpenGL ES) and tried out HTML5 mobile development, which, at least at that time, was a bit of a frustrating mess. Sound was a huge mess. Some sfx would work, some wouldn't, some background music would sound weird, etc. And you had no recourse, since you were using an abstraction layer or framework that was actually managing your game.

Maybe things are better now, as this was a while back and things seemed to have been progressing rapidly.

Now as far as the actual markets, unfortunately I have watched as the mobile gaming market has gotten shadier. Sadly, this has been fueled by the users. The users want games that look more and more like real console and PC games (which the power of the devices is allowing), but have constantly rejected games for more than $5. Obviously there is a problem there. And how developers have made up for this is through tons and tons of pay-services, pay-per-levels, purchasable items, DLC, etc. Many of these games are designed to bleed 5x - 10x what the initial download costs. The result? We get garbage like Final Fantasy: All the Bravest.

And the players largely seem to be accepting this. These types of games have countless downloads. So trying to make an honest, all-up-front game puts you at a disadvantage. Your screenshots won't be able to compete with GameLoft's, even though they are going to wring the goo out of anyone that buys their games. And screenshots are largely how most games are chosen by users.

I'm still a fan of http://monkeycoder.co.nz.

Luke111 wrote:I'm still a fan of http://monkeycoder.co.nz.

Interesting! I have never seen that before. Reminds me a lot of The Game Creators' AGK (Blitz and TGC are fierce competitors of each other dating back to the DarkBASIC Classic and Blitz 3D days).

What language does Monkey use? Blitz? Have you successfully submitted to any of the app stores yet?

Monkey uses the Monkey language. The Monkey language is like BlitzMax, but with classes, interfaces, generics, etc.
I would have submitted to the app store already, but my Bloxel games use too much multithreading (which doesn't work in Monkey). Also, there is no good UDP library yet for Monkey. There is a built-in asynchronous TCP system available.

That doesn't mean it is not usable. In fact, it is very usable. You can make monkey integrate with regular web pages. For instance, an idea I had was to use minib3d-monkey (a 3d library for monkey via. webgl/xna/gles, etc.) to show a 3d preview of the user's character in a PBBG on their profile. Now that would be original!

That sounds cool, particularly the asynchronous TCP part as well as the real classes (that was one thing I never liked about DarkBASIC was the lack of OOP)!

wow yeah thanks for the link.

The idea came into my head to make a realtime-strategy tower deference game of some sort. I've been digging deep into XAML the last half year, and could make a tower defence game quite easy for windows 8. But where's the fun if it's not multiplier.