In this post, rainwarrior wrote:
You just need to show that you can make something worth selling, and that you have reasonable business plan for it
Part of forming a business plan is finding a route to market. The developer programs for the major handheld game systems (Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita) appear intended more for a full-time team and a budget upwards of tens of thousands of dollars than for a lone developer operating in his free time after a day job. I'm told itch.io is better suited for smaller-scale projects. It supports PC (Windows, macOS, and X11/Linux), touch-screen (iOS, Android), and web-based products. So for a handheld game with a budget under $25,000, I see three options:
- An Android game using physical buttons
- An Android or iPhone game adapted to use the touch screen
- Skipping handhelds entirely and falling back to Windows plus macOS or X11/Linux, which would require users to sit at a desk or TV to play, and selling on itch.io then Steam
It currently costs about $850 to get started with mobile development. This figure assumes buying hardware for one major mobile platform (iOS or Android) first and using proceeds from that to expand to the other major mobile platform. It should be within reach of a hobbyist who already earns a living wage at a day job. So I'll examine both of these handheld options:
There are several Android handhelds with buttons, including GPD XD, the NVIDIA SHIELD Portable, a JXD tablet, or even a phone and a MOGA clip-on gamepad. But I don't see any evidence that these are in any way popular. Several of these manufacturers didn't publish sales numbers on their websites when I checked, which surprised me because I thought they would be eager to brag to prospective developers about the users they could reach.
That leaves touch screens. I tried playing Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure, a Super Mario-inspired platformer that tried to translate gamepad controls fairly literally using an on-screen gamepad. I downloaded the free subset of that game on Google Play Store to my Nexus 7 (2012) tablet. Control through a Bluetooth keyboard was fine, and I assume control on a device with buttons would be similar. But control with the touch screen was an exercise in frustration as I kept "whiffing", or pressing outside the active area of the controls. The same thing happened when I tried playing NES games in an NES emulator. It was even worse than a Turbo Touch 360.
Really only two kinds of games work well on a touch-only device: point-and-click games, where you're expected to be looking at what you're touching, and games where the whole screen is the button. A lot of platformer franchises that get ported to Android end up watered down to continuous runner games in the latter category. (Video game reviews call these "endless runners", though strictly that should refer to continuous runners with randomized levels.) Flappy Bird, Jetpack Joyride, and Rayman Jungle Run are continuous runners. Compare Banana Kong to its presumed inspiration Donkey Kong Country. I remember reading a bit by Tim Rogers about how Super Mario could be turned into a two-button continuous runner, with one half of the screen being a jump button and the other half for swipes to stop and go. This gets you up to Atari 2600-class control, with one button and one joystick. But I don't see how it'd apply to something like Mega Man that requires both precision jumping and precision shooting in both directions, or to a Metroidvania.
Which jumping games for Android have comfortable touch controls without being endless runners? Or are gamepad-oriented indie games, such as ports from NES, Genesis, or Super NES homebrew, stuck at a desk?
EDIT: A previous version of this post referred to Rayman Jungle Run as an endless runner. It has been corrected to clarify the broad and narrow sense of this term.