The last 2 years of writing has been primarily focused on making games with Monkey-X. While I will continue to make games, the focus of my writing will be changing a little.
Last fall as I was getting ready to try to release games to mobile, I built my first Android app. It is a little rental property cashflow estimation calculator and I had a lot of fun making it and figuring out some of the Android development basics. But I didn’t write about it because the focus of this blog was about making games.
This is going to change.
New Focus
I am a web developer by day, and one of the reasons I like the web and web development is because you can write an application one time and as long as someone has a web browser they can use it. Not only that, but most of the logic can be kept on your server so you are really in charge of the environment the code is hosted in. Client heavy web apps using various Javascript libraries have changed some of this but for the most part it is true. And it has gotten even better as web browsers are converging better on standards.
One of my strong dislikes is having to do the same work twice. If I can find a way to do it only once I will. If I can build a system that does it for me so I never have to do it again I will.
This is one of the reasons I chose Monkey-X as I started making games. It deploys cross platform. Whether you want to put it on the web, on a phone, or on the desktop you can write your game logic in a single code base with usually some small tweaks per platform. The basic game logic remains the same.
Starting this month I will be adjusting the overall focus of the blog to cross platform development in general, no longer just games. The primary focus will be on the Xamarin platform.
Xamarin
Xamarin is a company and the name of their framework or toolset. It is a .NET based framework for allowing you to write apps that share as much code as possible between Windows 10, iOS, and Android.
Microsoft bought Xamarin last year (2016) and at time of this writing it is free for solo developers to get started with them.
The reason I am choosing it is the same reason I chose Monkey-X. Giving me the ability to write something once and then use that multiple times is exactly what I am looking for. And I want to create apps that work well on the phone. Their are some hybrid web solutions using things like Cordova where you write your app in Javascript, HTML, CSS and build it for the phone but that is not what I am looking for right now.
Bonus, Xamarin has a platform for making games with it called CocosSharp (part of the Cocos2D family) that I may utilize.
So look for coming updates on making cross platform apps and games.