Spelutveckling för handdatorer Utvärdering av spelutveckling till mobila plattformar

Abstract

This master thesis aims to provide an understanding of the problems around game development for mobile devices and all the platforms that exists on mobile devices. To illustrate these problems I have ported a graphical library from Pocket PC to Palm OS. This master thesis describes the design, implementation and evaluation for this graphical platform. My main issue was to examine if it was possible to create mobile game with high graphical performance and make them run on an arbitrary platform. To evaluate my work I have made a benchmark to see if the graphical platform was equally fast on both Pocket PC and Palm OS. I also took the well known computer game XKobo and ported it from Pocket PC to Palm OS to see if my graphical platform was adequate fast to develop mobile games. The problems encountered during this process are further discussed and results evaluated according to performance and the possibility of producing portable games for mobile devices. Mobile games have become a growing market and many of the large game development companies have open there eyes for this new market. Nokia, Sony and Nintendo are some of the companies that have realized the potential of mobile games. There are many different vendors on the market and all of them have there own platform and there own hardware. To make game development profitable the major vendors have to unite around a standard or the developers have to create platform independent games. This thesis will discuss if it is possible to create platform independent games with a common code base.