Alrighty then, as I mentioned before I was going to discuss different game engines I have come across over the past few months. All engines I will go over are either free or open source.
Okay, now to start with the first.Last year, I got an oh so wonderful HTC Droid Eris for my Birthday. It is the cool gadget I always wanted, being able to do EXACTLY what it was designed for (take that Nokia NGAGE) and then some. I immedieatly downloaded the Android SDK and started programming for the device. Android has all its programs written in Java (which is good, because I don't have time to start learning objective C) and can be tested directly on the phone (if you have a PC with a processor < 2 GHz, don't even think about using the emulator, which takes over a minute to load). So all that was left was to find an engine that I can use. Being the lazy baga that I am, I found someone elses work and decided to use that.So I came across the Rokon Engine[here ], a 2D game engine that uses OpenGL for its graphics. It is great since it has support for sprites, animation, tilesets, sound, touch input (using what it calls hotspots), and anything else I can think of. It also runs on my phone at 60 fps (on the phone. On my monster rig it runs at half that speed). Before I could use it, I had to tweak it from the inside (since my phone uses android 1.5 instead of the recommended 1.6) just to keep it from crashing. Also I bought the book "Hello, Android" by Ed Burnette to get me up to speed (so worth it). After 6 hours of exercise, I was able to make a simple room, with one sprite, a background and 2 hotspots to make the character move left and right.
Not bad for a weeks work, but there are a few issues. First, the hotspots don't seem to register very well. I will try replacing them with buttons to make the response faster. Second, the classes for collision detection are incomplete. If I can get this fix/replaced I should have a working game ready in no time.In the mean time try out the engine at http://code.google.com/p/rokon/ . OK, bye for now.
Cool beans. I've never been too interesting in programming for portable devices, but I must admit, it does sound somewhat appealing.
I always wanted to, but never had the patience or money.
I'd like to program for the DS but I don't have a card that would let me do that =/
I tried making stuff for DS, but got bored after drawing text on the screen. Sadly I used an emulator.
DS is actually the only handheld (apart from GBA) I actually made things for, even if they weren't really much at all. Maybe other handhelds would be easier with the right kinds of things.Theres the Dingoo and GP2x wiz, but neither are as popular as the DS. The only benefit is both portables are linux based so it should be easier to program for them.