Tapping into the BlackBerry Gaming Market

Ever wanted to know what’s involved in developing BlackBerry software? What about a BlackBerry game?

Andrey Butov has already built BlackBerry Spam Filter software and now he’s working on a BlackBerry game.

I wanted to learn more about the BlackBerry game market after my recent interview with Andrey and what’s involved in building a game for the device we all so lovingly call the “CrackBerry.”

What’s the market like for BlackBerry games, and games in the “casual gamer” market?

There are many BlackBerry games on the market. Unfortunately, most of them are sub par to what people now expect from desktop games. The resolution of the BlackBerry screen, the limitations of the hardware, and the variance between the devices, make it more difficult to write games unless one is used to “hacking code” to be fast and small.

As an example, the next Antair release for the BlackBerry will be a game called “Asteroid Jane.” The code not only has to support four different resolutions (with different aspect ratios for each), in order to accommodate the four major types of screens for BlackBerry models, but it also has to squeeze as much as possible into every frame cycle, and present itself in a very small delivery package, since most BlackBerry users prefer to download and install the game using wireless facilities.

As such, for some people, the code for both Antair Spam Filter and Asteroid Jane looks like its giving the finger to all modern software engineering practices – no getter / setter methods, no abstractions, no fancy design patterns; Java that looks more like stripped down C than anything else. Up until a few months ago, the BlackBerry API didn’t even support floating point numbers – no floats, no doubles — and when I started writing the spam filter, I had to implement my own floating point types using fixed integers. But this is what it takes to make passable software on this platform. Folks who used to hack code a decade or two ago, before bloatware became acceptable, would feel right at home.

There are other considerations aside from technical ones. People who play games on the BlackBerry usually do so while in the middle of their commute or in some other circumstances where they have 5 or 10 minutes to kill. One has to keep these things in mind when designing the game play. The game should be something you can start up, get into, enjoy, and shut down within a matter of minutes.