Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
increase in effort on your side. Even if you choose one particular graphics API, you
still have to support a wide array of operating systems. This increase in effort simply
widens the market for your game. It doesn
t make your game fun or provide a deeper
experience. It just keeps it from misbehaving on someone
'
'
s computer.
I almost forgot
what about iOS and Android? If you are writing games for these
platforms, you still have to deal with the differences between OS releases: Android
2.0 is different than 2.1 or 2.2. iOS is the same way. If you decide to support a wide
variety of platforms and operating systems, I highly suggest you consider using a
game engine like Unity, which hides a lot of these problems and simply lets you
make your game. Doing it yourself is a big problem, and to be honest, not one that
makes any financial sense.
Moving games to very dissimilar platforms can be nigh impossible, such as a direct
port of a PC game to a handheld device. The lack of a keyboard or game controller,
different screen resolution, radically difference graphics performance, and smaller
secondary storage preclude some games from being directly portable even if the oper-
ating system is the same. That doesn
—
t even begin to address the inherent design con-
cerns that differ sharply from handhelds to desktops
'
—
the players on these devices
simply want different things out of gaming.
The game industry, for all its size and billions of dollars of annual revenue, is not the
most stable employment opportunity out there. You can almost guarantee that if you
get a job in the industry you
ll be working with a completely different set of people
every two years or so, and perhaps even more often than that.
Every year at the Origin Christmas party, employees were asked to stand up as a
group. Everyone who had worked there less than a year was asked to sit down, fol-
lowed by second and third year employees. This process was repeated until only a
handful of people were left. This was usually by the fourth or fifth year. In my sixth
year, I became the twelfth most senior person in the company by time of service, and
Origin had hundreds of employees. This can be fairly common throughout the indus-
try
'
but you can find some companies that are different by the nature of their prod-
uct or culture. They are just harder to find, unfortunately.
The stresses of incredibly short schedules and cancelled projects have chased many of
my friends out of the industry altogether. Whole studios, including two of my own,
take root for a while and then evaporate or get bought. Your boss today will not be
your boss tomorrow, especially if your boss attempts to do something crazy, like start
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