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 Developing
Action-based Mobile Games by Marcus Matthews [11.25.02]
During the first phase of mobile gaming, traditional game developers
sat on the sidelines. The mobile gaming era starting with WAP gaming,
and the text only displays did not stir up interest. The environment
was slow and awkward and WAP gaming development did not exploit
the strengths of Gameboy and console developers. Now a new generation
of phones is on the market, with the processors, memory, and color
depth provide the ingredients for compelling game development. This
article discusses some of the high level issues for developing Gameboy-style
action games for the new set of phones, focusing on the phones and
platforms supported by the major carriers.
 Games
on the Run: Comparing J2ME and BREW for Wireless Gaming by Ralph
Barbagallo [11.25.02] A new generation of phones similar to
those available in Japan is approaching Europe and the Americas,
however, and two major platforms are vying for supremacy over these
new handsets. Sun Microsystems' Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) and
Qualcomm's Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW) have emerged
in as the leading development environments for mobile gaming. UPDATE:
Ralph Barbagallo extends his comparison with a look at the future
of BREW in BREW and Beyond
 Postmortem:
Games Kitchen's Wireless Pets by David MacQueen [11.25.02]
When The Games Kitchen began Wireless Pets, WAP (Wireless Access
Protocol) was as much in its infancy as the company and the publisher
was. Wireless Pets was an ambitious title. We'd never done anything
that big or complex, we had to expand the company for this title,
and DB had to expand their platform to handle it. Heck, we weren't
even sure if WAP (or, more accurately, the usually poor implementation
of WAP found on the new devices) could handle it. But we did it
anyway, and it became the biggest WAP game in Europe, with over
15 million minutes of airtime on 18 operators. The SMS version looks
set to repeat that success. This is the story of both WAP and SMS
versions.
 Product
Review: Metrowerk's Codewarrior Wireless Studio 7 by Ralph Barbagallo
[11.25.02] Metrowerks seems to have their hand in just about
every platform's development tool suite these days. Metrowerks'
Codewarrior is now available for just about every platform and operating
system imaginable. Version 7 of Codewarrior Wireless Studio aims
to provide an inexpensive and robust development environment for
wireless application programmers using Java. This includes not only
mobile phones, but PDAs, set top boxes, and other Java-enabled devices
using J2ME, J2SE, and even PersonalJava.
 Developing
for Two Phone Extremes: Comparing the Nokia 6310i and the Nokia
3650 by Oliver Maio [11.25.02] Being on the cutting edge
of cell phone game development is extremely fun. But it can also
be frustrating when the hardware does not match initial expectations.
Normally, game developers have a fair idea of what type of code
their target hardware can handle. However, when you are trying to
stay at the forefront of an industry that introduces new handsets
every few months, you do not have this luxury. Then, all too often,
we find out that the handset is worse than expected and we spend
days re-engineering and wrangling the game onto a phone. This feature
focuses on two very different handsets that pleasantly surprised
us by running our J2ME (mobile Java) games the first time around.
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