I picked up the new Motorola "Droid" phone. I'm a big fan of Linux and this has to be one of the most useful devices I've purchased in recent memory. Of course, my first thought was how I might write some code for the Android platform.
Google's SDK is very Java-oriented. I've done some development in Java, long ago, and didn't care for the experience. My last gig at Microsoft required a lot of C# work, which brought back the bad-old-days of Java programming. Fortunately, Google also provides an NDK for native development. I guess C++ is a programmer comfort zone to me.
After a bit of hackery, I was running a simple OpenGL ES app. It was cute. The process was relatively painless, and I was thrilled to have my bits shuffled by my Droid's ARM-7. After stewing on it for a while, I began to wonder if maybe I was being too harsh on Java/C# and other languages for game development. Most of the work I've done over the past decade have been on large, expensive productions -- not something you build on today's mobile platforms. I was guilty of using the C++ hammer in my toolbox to the exclusion of everything else.
So, I've decided to put together a Flash-based game with an eye to porting it to Java and C# for other platforms (Android/XNA perhaps)? All of the targets support blasting bits around to a display device or bitmap, so I'm going old-school. I forgot how much fun it is to watch a simple game evolve over the course of a few hours and a few hundred lines of code.
If the game reaches a playable state and would otherwise be destined to rot in my bit-locker, maybe I'll post a walkthrough here on the blog. It may not be C++, but it is game development, and not every nail is a multi-million dollar production requiring a C++ hammer.
