Indie Game Dev: Platforms

If I were publishing this game, what platform would it be on? Android. Fade to black.

I'm completely serious, but let's see how I arrived there.

I'm just doing this for fun and to build out my pipeline, at least for the first project. So it's not going to be a huge, serious piece. No 3D augmented reality, no social media presence, no infinitely scalable backend hosted out of an old missile silo.

Console is out, they don't give those SDKs to just anybody, and I don't own any consoles regardless. Ouya is dead, and sadly I never bothered getting one. I'm not going to cobble something together with a Raspberry Pi, that's not the project I'm looking for right now.

PC is of course do-able, but it's harder and less fun than you might think. If you're just making a game for yourself that's one thing, but if you have any designs on publishing down the road, you have to face the nightmare that is Other People's Weird Hardware.

I really just want to bang out a quick little game using a simple system. I want something that could be published via Somebody Else's Platform, in case I change my mind and go that route. I'm a mobile guy and I (mostly) understand that space and those systems. So it's gonna be iOS or Android.

Either platform is theoretically fine, I'm equally familiar with both. Let's do pros and cons.

iOS pros:

• C-like native code -- I don't mind Objective C, it's quirky, and I like quirky
• Lots of framework support

I had trouble thinking of any others. Cons:

• Objective C is probably going away in favor of Swift, and I'm too tired to learn another language today, so very tired
• It's a closed system
• You have to have a Mac, and what's more, you have to build and debug with XCode
• You can't build and run an app on your own device without a developer's license
• The license is $100 USD / annum
• The code signing procedure is bonkers complicated, and you have to renew 3 or 4 cryptographic keys/certificates/profiles every year
• IDFA and various other monopolistic practices
• The approval process can be a crapshoot

Android pros:

• Open system
• You can develop and build your apps on any platform -- including OSX if that's your jam
• Once you've built that APK, you can install it on any Android in the world, nobody cares
• A developer's license costs a one-time fee of $25 USD, and you don't need it until you want to distribute the app on Google Play
• You create a single production key once, and signing is all automatic after that. Google will even hold the key for you.
• Advertise with whomever you want. Collect whatever data you want, provided you adhere to the laws of the countries you're publishing in
• Is there an approval process? There is, but I've never seen a rejection. Seriously, never have I ever
• Crash reports that you can symbolicate yourself

Cons:

• Java. *Sigh*. This is mostly mitigated by the NDK, but if you want to interface with any OS services, you're probably doing it with Java
• App permissions are a bit of a moving target

As you can see, I'm no fan of iOS, and the "privacy" shenanigans over the last year have not helped that one little bit. I love Woz, but everything else Apple can be launched directly into the sun.

So... Android. Fade to black.