The good folks of The Slowdown are at the Dubai World Game Expo (grumble lucky sods grumble) and were able to snag an interview with Epic Games’ Jay Wilbur. In this review, he discusses the Unreal Engine, the Unreal Development Kit, developing games for the iOS, and well as a little bit about developing for Android. Here's a clip wherein Mr. Wilbur is showing the interviewer a demo of Epic Citadel on his Galaxy S:
What are the challenges in developing for Android? The demo there seems to be running great.
It runs really well and really fast. One of the problems with the Android marketplace is hardware fragmentation, that’s a really big issue. The other thing is marketplace fragmentation, there are so many different appstores out there. The Android marketplace is a little more difficult [to develop for] because there is less control. I think the Android marketplace is robust … I find it very easy to buy things on it, it’s just that Apple has very tight control. So anything in the Apple world is perfect. It’s just perfect. We like that, we like that a lot. We know that it’s just gonna work. Sometimes that’s not always the case in the Android marketplace.
Can't really dispute his comments, can we? As much as we love our Androids, fragmentation is and will continue to be an issue for a while. However, it didn't stop the PC from becoming the dominant computing platform in the world. Just sayin'. ;)
You can read the whole interview by heading over to The Slowdown by clicking the link below.
[via The Slowdown]
I don’t understand how fragmentation is such an issue, but that’s probably cause I know nothing of programming. From my perspective, it just means that devs cross out a percentage of the user base depending on the how demanding they make their game. Users have to read minumum specs of what software they buy.
The Android market got better in the last year, but someone needs to do a big cleaning in it. The amount of copyright infriging apps (mainly gaming) is ridiculous. Open is good, but it doesn’t mean there should be no quality control. And the usualy 15m refund complaints..