Do your Handset Ports in Minutes! A Lesson in Streamlined Development and Production for the Forward-Thinking Developer

Speakers: Guido Henkel

Track: Mobile: Planning Ahead

Format: Lecture

Experience Level: All

Description: Developing games for the mobile market is challenging in many ways. With literally every phone handset having its own technical specs and quirks, and featuring a variety of operating systems, one of the biggest challenges for successful developers in this field is to overcome these differences and create code that is easily portable into all environments without sacrificing performance.

Using concrete code examples this session explains techniques used by professional developers in the mobile space that ensure a high level of portability while allowing to make full use of each target’s idiosyncrasies and features. It illustrates in concise examples how to optimize the production pipeline and how to build code and frameworks that can be ported to virtually any platform easily and efficiently. It explains how to work with and around hardware dependencies, without creating a jungle of code or losing performance, and it kickstarts thinking in terms that are removed from the immediate technical specs of a platform.

Idea Takeaway: Attendees will take away proven techniques that have been put to use in various published mobile games. These techniques will be illustrated using actual code samples. It will also instill ideas how to find and avoid pitfalls that may prevent their code from being portable to other platforms and to streamline the production pipeline with portability in mind.

Intended Audience: Audience members with experience in the mobile field on various platforms will benefit the most from the techniques shown, as they are able to immediately put them to work in their own projects. But also programmers who are just getting started in the field or are just generally curious about cross-platform development will benefit from the techniques presented here. Most examples will be from BREW development but the methods and lessons learned can be applied to any other platform equally.