Mobigamedepot.com Opens

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed a reduction of posts here. The reason for this has been that I’ve been working on Palm WebOS games and a corresponding website mobigamedepot.com.

This new website will be the portal for the games that I will be developing and I will post some behind the scenes details about the development work here on Cochinoman for your reading pleasure.

For starters, why did I choose the Palm WebOS platform? When the iPhone first came out, I wanted to do development work for it but since I’m not a Mac user, there was that learning curve and the SDK was not available at first. Then before I realized, everybody and his brother was on the iPhone platform and it was too late to get in the game.

Fast forward 2 years and when the Palm WebOS was announced at CES last year, my interest was again peaked. I followed the SDK development closely and managed to get on the software developer program as an early developer.

The WebOS SDK has a lot of limitations, especially for real-time games, but it also makes it less likely that the big boys will be getting on this path. As it turns out, there is a new PDK that was announced at this year’s CES that allows for low level C/C++ coding and the big boys (e.g. EA) has come out with their 3D games for the WebOS.

This last move still doesn’t deter me from working on my games because the big budget EA games will have to sell for $7-$10 and I will target the below $2 market for my games. There’s no way that EA could sell their games for 99 cents and still make money because of their overhead in developing these heavy games.

My first released game is “Lunar Attack,” which is basically an upgraded “Missile Command” with more features. In the future, I will post about the decisions that were made regarding this first game.  The second game I am working on is a scrolling sprite based game that takes place in a Pyramid.

If you are thinking about developing games on any mobile platform, you may find the articles interesting.  Even if you are thinking about non-game development on a mobile device, you might find something interesting in there.