I had some in my breakfast, and now I'm working on getting a free Playbook made by them (the company Blackberry, that is). You can too! If you make Flash games. Check out the steps and some really helpful tutorials on the process right here:
Flashgamelicense. It sounds fun to me, and should be very little work if these massive downloads ever finish. It's not a contest, it's "if they accept your game, you get a playbook". Not bad. You have to be done and submitted before March 15th, and apparently there's a bunch of paperwork involved that will go slowly, so be aware of that, procrastinators (-ters?).
Now I have to pick a mouse-only game to do. I only have a few that could reasonably fit the bill (without, you know,
work). I'm kind of wondering about trying
Zoobedoo. I don't want to do a whole lot of updating though, and I'm not entirely convinced of its merit as a game as is. I like its core, but it needs some kind of touch-up, and I'm not sure what that touch-up is. Whatever game, if it works out, maybe it'll finally be the long-awaited (by me) time to port
Moon Invaders to Flash, with some little updates (like
words), and then submit that too, just because. I mean once I have all this junk installed, why waste it? And because I still want Moon Invaders to be in Flash!
Then there's also Android.
Flashgamelicense has a little thing going on for porting to them too, but $50 doesn't quite get me revved up like a big old tablet (they have a video showing the port being done in 6 minutes though, so maybe it's worth it to you!). They also say they have some Droids they want to give out to people who commit to stuff though, so maybe I should suggest something. I need to learn how rough the process of porting to it is. Probably easier than this crazy Blackberry thing I'm doing! I hear there are so many different Droid devices with wildly varying specs that it's just a mess, though. Not sure I want to be involved in that.
Also, in theory at least, you can compile Flash onto iPhone too, but so far the process sounds very daunting. I might try to hire somebody to do that porting for me. I'd love to be simultaneously dishing out iPhone versions of Flash games (or even non-simultaneously, I just want to get them on there, when they are the kind that works on that platform).
Speaking of some of those topics, here's a fun dark secret from the past: there was somebody who offered to port Moon Invaders to iPhone a year or two ago. We got things signed, got it going, they even sent me a working build I could play on my iPod which was really close to ready. It worked, it was fun, it crashed occasionally, it was a little hard to play. But we talked about the tweaks it was going to have (at that point it was almost a straight port, just to get it up and running), and it seemed like things were happening. Then they just vanished, and that was that. No more Moon Invaders. That kind of thing is remarkably common in game development. I know people freak out every time I cancel a game or get distracted, but at least I'm still cranking out (insane numbers of) games, not just disappearing.
Uh oh, my last download is done for Blackberry stuff! Guess I have some massive installing to do.
