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.
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.