I've been thinking about writing this post for about a month now. I should preface it by saying that I've found myself internally conflicted between software freedom and making a living. This is a fact that I'm reminded of every time I point out to a member of the Ubuntu community that I've moved from working on Launchpad to working on Ubuntu One. Let me be straight about this: I love Ubuntu, and I love software freedom. I also love fistfuls of cash. Some days, this internal conflict is maddening.
I have loved games since I was young enough to remember. My interest in technology came from learning to repair my NES console when I was 5. Last month, I met a fantastic artist named Jess Smart Smiley. He and I conspired to make a Halloween themed game in our spare time.
I don't have much of a desire to create games professionally, so I'm more interested in designing and creating games classified as "indie". Having blogged about the potential ecosystem for indie games before, I already had a head start on what our first target would be.
The first thing we thought about is existing and mature development libraries. The most popular mobile game framework is cocos2d. It was originally a framework for iOS, but also has an Android port. I also considered Ansca Mobile's Corona framework, but its high cost for both platforms (iOS and Android) made me eliminate it. The Android port of cocos2d had it's last commit Nov 15, 2010.
After looking at software, we started looking at the hardware. I have never owned an iPhone, but I've owned every one of Google's official Android phones. My wife has also had Android phones for a number of years now. She's not a gadget person, but she recently fell in love with an Android tablet (the Asus Transformer) and so we have a number of Android devices around the house. The only iOS device we had was my iPad. As I looked at the form factors and various hardware for Android, I thought "Oh man, this is going to be a QA nightmare." I tried out a number of Android devices and they each had their own quirks/lag/bugs. With the exception of a weird home screen bug in my Android devices, I never had that "lag" that everyone seems to be complaining about on my Nexus phones, but my wife's first Android phone was a huge piece of junk with a plastic touchscreen and Android 1.6. There are basically 4 different hardware configurations for iOS, and only 4 (currently).
We decided that our first game would target iOS.
After we decided on iOS, I had lunch and/or !coffee with a few local mobile game developers. All but one had experience with both Android and iOS. They all had the same problem with the Android market: people decompiling/recompiling their apps and putting them on the Android Market for free. It's basically an arms race at that point, where you spend your days sending takedown notices to various Android stores instead of developing new stuff. The developers who were still committed to Android said that the only way they've made money is by using ads. I don't like that, since your mobile's screen is small enough already without ads taking up part of the screen (or dealing with artificial load times while you show ads).
We'll probably move into Android in the future, especially with its market share growing like it is. However, for the our first game, I feel confident iOS was the best platform to deploy to.
If you're interested in our game, become a fan of Skeleton Jump on Facebook!
UPDATE: Lucio points out on Twitter that cocos2d is actually originally a python implementation. I knew this, but didn't see much connection between the two.