Hello from Pizza & Accessibility of Games Today
Hey, having had 3 consecutive days of free time in a row has finally gotten me a little time to think about game development again. I started working full-time at the first of March, a bit over 2 month ago, and in the wake of that, apart from not having any time for anything anymore at all, I was finally able to afford some of those fancy gadgets everybody seems to be sporting these days - starting with a 3DS and Wii U, going all the way to a smart phone and even being able to try out different kinds of VR headsets. Now, all the little games I made last year were either flash or Unity based, and while there are downloadable versions of most of them around for various systems, you’re kinda gonna be having a hard time playing any of them if you’re just browsing game portals looking for something to click on and check out immediately. Flash isn’t supported by anything but desktop PCs anymore, the Unity Web Player has been unsupported and who’s gonna be downloading exe files at this point in time? So I’ve been thinking - how would you be able to support the most platforms, or rather, provide the fastest and best way of accessing a game on the broadest range of platforms, while still being able to work in a comfortable development environment? Say you got your desktop PC, your mobile phones, your handheld consoles and stationary consoles. You could see to publish your game as an executable to various game portals for desktop PCs, the google play store for android phones, iTunes for iPhones, and maybe something something eShop for Nintendo’s current consoles. You would have to tailor your game specifically to each of those platforms, design and code-wise. Sift through a heap of legal papers and regulations for each platform while still worrying about developing a good video game. To me, that sounds impossible to do on your own.
Instead, you could develop an HTML5 game. That would run on all of the above as far as I know. Though, you’d still have to worry about a lot of things like varying aspect ratio and or resolutions, means of control and whatnot. Instead of all of that, you develop a game specifically for a single platform. Undertale did that, Ketchapp is doing that, Nintendo is doing that, and I think it’s the answer.
What this means for the future of Pizzamakesgames is that I might pick platforms and target my efforts to a specific medium, trying out a little bit of this and that, throwing small games at the wall to see what sticks and keep going from there. Regarding Skullz ‘n’ Skeletonz, that might still mean nothing. Like, I might just continue developing it for desktop PCs and nothing but, or I might try and make little teasers of it for various platforms as an exercise, especially seeing that I didn’t have time to look at a single line of code in almost three months, I could see something like that leading to results a tad faster than trying to finish a fully featured game as my next immediate release. For now, I think I’ll try and organize my online presence to fit the current times of mobile devices a bit better. I honestly still have no idea how my tumblr looks on a smart phone, and I might let some media outlets fall off the wagon in favor of others in the near future. Maybe an own domain is in order. We’ll see. Thanks for reading, and feel free to engage. Conversation is a good thing.