Porting to which gaming platforms?

Question

I'm developing a pretty portable indie game engine and also a "demo" game to go with that. In the future I would however like to make a more comprehensive game to deploy on some different platforms. The details on the future game is less important, I'm more into the "how" than the "what" -- genre and content is irrelevant to me.

So what target platform would you recommend? And what cheap features (which rocked immensely) have you successfully developed for that platform? Please keep cost-effectiveness in mind, since my budget won't allow for purchasing SDKs with price tag of 10k U$.

Edit: I am really interested in what cheap features you have successfully developed for a certain platform. E.g. "I made this awesome two-finger-touch-input-control-method-for-a-retro-type-this-and-that-game for iPod in no time and it rocked -- I can really recommend that platform/approach!"

Answer 1

PC - Free SDKs :)

Answer 2

Since your budget doesn't allow purchasing mult-thousand dollar dev kits, your options are a bit limited - Playstation, Wii, and native XBox development are out.

I'd recommend Windows PC and XBox 360 using XNA Game Studio. XNA is free and runs on both of those platforms. It also has a good dev following, and there are lots of blogs and websites with info, tips and tricks, and samples. You can get started athttp://creators.xna.com.

Answer 3

you could also make your game engine cross platform that way you are able to develop for linux and windows at the same time. and if you are using your demo engine for a future position at a game company is a great achievement under your belt.

Answer 4

If you're wanting to consider development on the Wii/PS/etc. consoles that Michael notes are probably out of your price range, consider the homebrew development kits. They aren't supported or endorsed, but as far as getting to work with the technologies, they might help you decide whether you want to use those SDKs in future.

I hope that whatever project you are starting on works out well!

Answer 5

I think the question of "what" is VERY relevant in choosing a platform, since the platform has a major impact on who will be exposed to your game, and how it will be played.

Are you developing a game intended for multiple people sitting around the screen, ex. a trivia game, fighting game, sports game, etc? Then you probably want to be looking at a console like the 360. Are you looking for something a bit deeper? Dwarf Fortress, or the next great hex-based wargame? You probably want to go PC. A shooter? Something with a mouse. PC again. A flight sim that requires a thousand different buttons? Something with a keyboard, like the PC again. Are you building a simple Popcap-style puzzle game? you might look at an SDK for some kind of handheld device.

Tell us what you want to build and we can recommend a platform

edit: if it was me, PC would be my default platform no matter what

Answer 6

This doesn't help you but is worth mentioning: World of Goo made a big splash and was released for Mac, Windows, Linux and even Wii. Allegedly they used something called the Experimental Gameplay Project but it appears not to have been released yet.

Answer 7

If you want to develop for PCs, may I suggest the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL)?

• It is a cross-platform (Linux, Windows, Mac (we need more games, please!), BSD, and others that no one cares about) library for developing graphics that is well-tailored for games.
• The best game of all time (at least, in my opinion) is written with it.
• It is free and open-source, but released under a permissive license, so you can do whatever you want with code you write on top of it. You can even dig into its internals and see how you might go about porting it to a platform SDL doesn't support, should you choose to do so.

Answer 8

PC, Linux, Mac, Iphone, XNA for Xbox 360, and Nintendo DS and Sony PSP homebrew are all very interesting targets. It's a fun challenge writing an engine that can work for all of those targets, but it's achievable.

If you abstract things well enough that you can hit all of those targets, extending it to something commercial like say... WiiWare in the future wouldn't be too big of a deal.