Porting Word Monaco to Windows Mobile - Part 2

I had a great conversation with Surur Davids from Window Mobile 24/7 in his email he says, "Your note about the profusion of resolutions in the windows mobile world is an interesting insight in itself. Who knew the market has already become so fragmented, and now with the new prominence of the smartphone platform things will become even more confusing for consumers and software developers." I agree with this. My team will have to work very hard to make the process of installing easy and error free. Fortunately, Microsoft has provided a nice suite of products to help developers.

I also received a request asking who the team members are. The team is made up of:

• Jim Patterson - Artist, animator, and designer. Jim will create every piece of art. He is 100% dedicated to his work and the results are fantastic.
• Wyatt Webb - Engineer, technology expert, graduate of MIT. Wyatt is the type of engineer who instantly grabs concepts and runs with them. Wyatt also programmed WordPop and Farkle for Pocket PC.
• John Winston - Sound engineer. John is the owner of Sound Audio Solutions, and has created all the sound and music for all our Palm and Pocket PC games. If you ever need sound or music for your games, applications, video, electronic toy, etc. his company is excellent.
• Todd Sherman - Producer, designer, and QA tester. Author of this blog.

I was hoping to cover features that need to be changed so the game feels like a Windows Mobile game, but will cover that in the next blog.

Porting Word Monaco to Windows Mobile - Part 1

Over the next several months I will provide updates and some of the thought processes involved in porting our new game Word Monaco Solitaire to the Windows Mobile platform.

One of the first choices I had to make was what versions of the operating system to support. Our framework was designed to work with Windows Mobile (WM) 2003 and 2003SE. Should the framework be updated to take full advantage of Windows Mobile 5 but possibly be WM 2003 incompatible? The team consensus was clearly no and I agreed. Since my game is a 2D puzzle, it would not need the full power of WM 5.0

The next question to answer was which screen resolutions to support? I can't support them all, as a privately owned company, I need to watch to bottom line carefully. After reviewing device sales data and pulling out the old crystal balls, several predictions were made on what might be released. Thus Word Monaco Pocket PC will support 240 x 320, 480 x 640, and 240 x 240. If the Motorola Q is a huge hit, 320 x 240 might be added to the mix. The art needs to be tweaked for each one of these resolutions, which increases costs. And the game code has to be modified too as the relative input changes (more on that later). Installation becomes more complex as the installer will need to detect the device type and install the correct files and technical support issues become more varied.

My next blog on Word Monaco will list out features that need to be changed so the game feels like a Windows Mobile game.

If you are interested in signing up to be informed when Word Monaco Solitaire for Windows Mobile is click here.