David
May 30, 2008, 03:37 PM
One of the really good outcomes of our acquisition by Handmark (http://www.handmark.com/) earlier this year is the opportunity to get our games into the hands of smartphone owners who haven't so far had access to them, and to give existing Astraware customers a wider choice of phones to run our games. There are two parts to this: the chance to develop for new device operating systems (platforms), and also the ability to get our games sold direct to mobile/cell phone customers on providers such as Sprint and Telus. I'll stick to talking about the first part though...
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/93/symbian.jpg
The first new platform release of 2008 was Symbian (S60 and UIQ) when Astraware Boardgames (/s60/boardgames/) was released in March. Work on Symbian had actually been going on since the start of 2007, so it was good to see the first game let loose! Hidden Expedition: Titanic (/s60/titanic/) and Astraware Solitaire (/preview/) have just followed and Platypus (/preview/) is nearly ready for release. Converting our games to Symbian is now a pretty smooth process, so you can expect to see our other own-brand titles appearing as well as time goes on. Larry (/company/team/index.php?name=larry) has done the vast majority of the work that went into our own-developed games onto Symbian, and I must prod him to write about his experiences...
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/93/bbcurve.jpg
The first new development platform of 2008 has been BlackBerry (http://www.blackberry.com/). It's a platform that until very recently we'd not ventured into as old BlackBerry smartphones used to be rather unfriendly when it came to games. Software for BlackBerry is written in Java rather than the C++ that we code in for all our other platforms, so we've had to write a new version of our game framework to work in the new (to us) language. But the opportunity has become huge, and once RIM released the pink Pearl (http://na.blackberry.com/pink/), we knew they were gunning for the consumer and that it made sense for us to start work!
An interesting aspect of the BlackBerry is going to be the fact that they are generally sold with a data plan, which isn't something we've been able to count on with other smartphones. One of the things I hope we'll gain from being part of Handmark is that they have been much more used to using data and networking, so it will push us to innovate there. I'll write another time on our thinking around mobile "gamer card" ideas and other such things.
To make sure that we understand what it is to be BlackBerry users, Howard, Alison and I have recently started using BlackBerry Curve smartphones. It's very early days on that, so we're still learning how things work.
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/93/symbian.jpg
The first new platform release of 2008 was Symbian (S60 and UIQ) when Astraware Boardgames (/s60/boardgames/) was released in March. Work on Symbian had actually been going on since the start of 2007, so it was good to see the first game let loose! Hidden Expedition: Titanic (/s60/titanic/) and Astraware Solitaire (/preview/) have just followed and Platypus (/preview/) is nearly ready for release. Converting our games to Symbian is now a pretty smooth process, so you can expect to see our other own-brand titles appearing as well as time goes on. Larry (/company/team/index.php?name=larry) has done the vast majority of the work that went into our own-developed games onto Symbian, and I must prod him to write about his experiences...
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/93/bbcurve.jpg
The first new development platform of 2008 has been BlackBerry (http://www.blackberry.com/). It's a platform that until very recently we'd not ventured into as old BlackBerry smartphones used to be rather unfriendly when it came to games. Software for BlackBerry is written in Java rather than the C++ that we code in for all our other platforms, so we've had to write a new version of our game framework to work in the new (to us) language. But the opportunity has become huge, and once RIM released the pink Pearl (http://na.blackberry.com/pink/), we knew they were gunning for the consumer and that it made sense for us to start work!
An interesting aspect of the BlackBerry is going to be the fact that they are generally sold with a data plan, which isn't something we've been able to count on with other smartphones. One of the things I hope we'll gain from being part of Handmark is that they have been much more used to using data and networking, so it will push us to innovate there. I'll write another time on our thinking around mobile "gamer card" ideas and other such things.
To make sure that we understand what it is to be BlackBerry users, Howard, Alison and I have recently started using BlackBerry Curve smartphones. It's very early days on that, so we're still learning how things work.