AGS iOS port?

[compaqdrew]

My day job is as an iOS developer.  I run a small development shop and we do primarily business/productivity apps, largely because we don't have any in-house art talent (we're coders).  We have a couple of games that we keep in the basement and work on, but it's hard working with outsourced artists.

One idea that we had was porting a popular engine or gamemaker to iOS, which would get us attached to lots of great game talent.  Obviously the problem with a port to a radically different architecture is getting performance up to par.  But adventure games have low performance requirements (relative to, say, arcade games) and so we've been thinking a little bit about whether it would make sense to create an AGS->iOS exporter or similar.

I've been a big fan of adventure games since I was a little kid (insert long boring anecdote about King's Quest here) and so I'm just naturally drawn to trying to make something like this a reality, but of course the devil's in the details.

Now this is pure speculation on our part at the moment--we're just sort of thinking about the possibilities.  If we did this, we would want it to at least hit break-even profitability (it's a many-month undertaking and we'd be passing up a lot of paying gigs), and I'm not sure that's even possible.  Obviously AGS has a very vibrant hobbyist community that's price sensitive as well as a few commercial development shops.  We've reached out to a few developers in particular, but I'd also like to collect some wider feedback about whether a project like this would be useful and/or useful enough to pay something for it.

There are a lot of interesting technical questions as well such as how any of this would actually work and/or how we would read the file formats, how Apple Review would work and so on, but I'd like to table those for now in favor of simply learning from you guys what the interest would be in theory for a way to bring your games to iOS.

[Baron]

Well, in theory I'm all in favour of being able to export AGS games to other formats, and there are probably a lot of users on the other end of iStuff that would like playing adventures.  While personally my sympathies might lie with a less exclusive mobile environment (ie Android), more exposure can't hurt.

Beyond theory and down to actually reaching for my wallet, I have to say I'd be very reluctant as a freeware developer to spend any money whatsoever converting it to be compatible with another platform.  I mean, I'm giving away all my hard work already -isn't that enough?  If I were hypothetically to release a commercial game we might well have something to talk about, but I am doubtful you'd get enough actual commercial AGS developers to compensate you enough for many months of profitless labour.  On the other hand, in the long run you may break even or better if AGS becomes well-known as an "easy entry point" for creating iContent.

In summary, I think it's a great idea but am seriously doubtful that you'd make the money back.

[voh]

Acting as a publisher would be your only bet to make any profit on this (ot pay-back, even). I agree with what Baron said, you can't sell freeware games (unless you offer the author a cut he/she agrees with), same if you want commercial games, you can only take a cut, which the game creator would have to agree with.

Your place in this would be, effectively, that of publisher. I have a hard time seeing any other way of spinning this.

Or, of course, you'd sell the exporter (or license it) and try to make money that way. This is an even harder sell...

Now, I've probably given this only a small percentage of thought compared to what you've put into it, so I'm interested in hearing what exactly you're proposing to do. Because it's not quite clear from your post..

[Darth Mandarb]

Ideally what I'd like to see would be, now that AGS is 'open source' would be somebody to create a plugin (or better yet an actual part of AGS) that exports the development files to iOS format.  So you can work on the game in one place but make it exportable to the iOS as well.

So I suppose you could create this plugin ... and sell/liscense that.  However; the very nature of the AGS community is free contributions.  So while you could make something like that (and charge for it) I suspect it would then only be a matter of time before it's recreated and freely offered.

My girlfriend and I have begun developing Aps (for iDevices) and this is something I have been thinking a LOT about lately (a way to make adventure games for the iPad primarily).  So I'm interested in what you come up.  I am not trying to discourage your endeavor just giving you the reality of the AGS community.

Good luck and keep us posted!

[Khris]

From a purely practical point of view, what about pixel-perfect and right clicking?

I don't see myself ever buying any iProduct, but I'm still wondering whether this is the right platform for traditional AGS games.
Will game authors really switch to a single click, "unprecise" interface on the off-chance somebody buys the game for the iPad?

Apple's store policy is another important matter; I cannot imagine they would give something the go-ahead that makes them lose their absolute control and possible censorship over/of available content.

[Peder 🚀]

Have this not allready been talked about and even a couple of guys working on something similar?

[Clarvalon]

Yep, albeit not a direct port:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo8RpxDBi-w

It's incomplete so nothing's been announced yet, but I've also got some stuff up and running on a Windows Phone 7: 





This is XAGE running on it's first handheld.  Android and iOS devices arguably more attractive platforms in terms of sheer userbase, though I am limited somewhat by a lack of hardware and funds for Mono licenses.  I'm considering setting up a KickStarter Project, but have no idea how likely it is to get backing or what incentives to offer.  In any case, lack of time is the bigger problem at the moment.

[Ryan Timothy B]

Excellent. And I just happen to have a Windows 7 phone.

Although I'm slightly disappointed with it compared to the Windows 6 (something) that I previously had. I could customize tons of things and run 3rd party applications right off the microSD card without relying on a bloody marketplace. Unless this can still be done with a WP7 and I just don't know it (of course minus the microSD card since they didn't want to support it).

[Stee]

This is XAGE running on it's first handheld.  Android and iOS devices arguably more attractive platforms in terms of sheer userbase, though I am limited somewhat by a lack of hardware and funds for Mono licenses.  I'm considering setting up a KickStarter Project, but have no idea how likely it is to get backing or what incentives to offer.  In any case, lack of time is the bigger problem at the moment.

Could you not give it a shot and ask for a free license in return for a final copy of XAGE?

I'm a little confused with the monodroid and monotouch stuff, as I thought the idea of mono was a free cross platform version of c# ??

Is it not likely that there are already free equivalents about / coming about, that defeat the purpose of forking out large sums of money for this?

A Kickstarter Project sounds like a solid idea if needs be too. I'm up for that as long as they'e solved their uk issues by now (last one I remember was Resonance and was restricted to Amazon payments which was US only at the time)

[Clarvalon]

You're right, Kickstarter is still only for US-based projects at the moment.  Balls.

I like the idea of democratic patronage, and I've been impressed by the success of various crowd-funded projects, most recently Exen, a project that met its $10,000 target and will be of direct benefit to XAGE.

In any event, it's unlikely I'd consider seeking funding until I've a small but complete game published on PC, Xbox and WP7.  Having that proof of concept in place would likely be an important piece of any potential pitch.  Mono itself is free but the libraries and frameworks Novell build on top of it, such as MonoTouch/MonoDroid, require licences.  They're fairly reasonable, but alongside the hardware costs it all starts to mount up.

Regarding WP7, it has its flaws but on the whole the OS is nicely designed.  Plus being able to cheaply develop and publish C# games is the trump card for me. 

As for adventure games on any touch device, there are a number of different gestures that can be used to overcome limitations of the interface (double-tap or tap & hold for an alternative click, pinch & zoom to overcome pixel-hunting).  Ben's '!' works fine for the most part, using double-tap to skip a cutscene and the WP7 back button to pause. 

[Stee]

Cool, I hadn't realised that guy had got his funding. His stuff looked pretty promising.

I've been out of the loop (excuse the pun) with programming with C# and other programming for so long now that I doubt I'd be able to help on the coding sides of things, but if you need a guinea pig for stuff I have a rooted HTC Desire HD, and a iPhone 3g, although  I'm not sure how long I'm keeping hold of the iPhone at the moment.