I have a small pile of money, a rather large Java game, and a burning desire to get it ported to iPad ASAP.
Cas 
I can understand that burning desire… IPad give so much idea !
If iOS and ObjC wasn’t such a turd this would have been fun.
1 - Yes (certainly you’ve seen me on JGO)
2 - Yes (I helped start an iPhone game company and now I am an iOS-among-other-languages engineer at ngmoco)
3 - Maybe
4 - Can provide
5 - My Engrish iz teh badz
6 - Yes
7 - Yes
The question for me really is #3, and also when you want development to start in earnest. I like my job, but I’ve been thinking that maybe I want to jump off and be independent at some point in my life. Now might not be that point, who knows, it really depends a lot on #3.
Gimme an email address and we can have a conversation. Or email me at eli delventhal gmail
cas, I assume you’re going to port Revenge of the Titans, right ?
My question is, is the iPad’s hardware badass enough to handle all the fancy effects of RoTT ? Because if not, it could be a big fail regardless of the developer you’re picking, and both sides would be quite frustrated .
(I’m not being pessimistic here, it’s just that when I tried porting a game of mine to Android, I spent like 2 months working on it just to see that it would be better to rewrite everything than trying to make miracles to improve performance)
Android is rubbish, though.
The iPad should cope with Revenge, as it’ll be ported to C++ most likely and therefore twice as fast anyway, though we’ll likely have to tune a particle effect or two. It doesn’t have to run at 60fps either, 30 will do.
Cas
Yes, the iPad should be able to handle it, as will the iPhone 4 and potentially the 3GS. The 3G and under are dead in the water, however.
Compared to what? Certainly not iPhone.
/agree
Saying android is rubbish is like saying a ferrari is rubbish
I fail to see the similarity between a crappy Java rip off VM running on a wide range of crappy hardware with a wide range of crappy bugs and an exquisite hand-built luxury sports car?
iOS = focused, awesome, fast, targeted. Low hanging fruit!
Android = far too slow, too buggy, and too fractured to bother supporting.
Cas
Getting further OT, but also keeping your thread bumped… 
I certainly wouldn’t equate Android with a Ferrari. No way, not even close. Android has plenty of problems, but it is still an absolute pleasure to work with compared to iOS and shitty Xcode. No offense, but do you have first hand experience with both platforms?
I’ve developed a few iPhone games: Funny Call, Lady Gaga karaoke, Jason Derulo karaoke, and SingSong karaoke. Some have even done well – Funny Call was #1 in utilities when it released and has hung around the top 20 since (currently 32). Even with this success, I’m done with iShit. Apple can take their crappy tools and suck it.
IMO, there are two kinds of iOS developers: 1) Those that don’t know better, that don’t realize the tools from the 90s they are forced to use are absolutely horrible, that are delighted to be locked in to proprietariness, etc and 2) Those that are willing to put up with a lot of shit to try to cash in. Unfortunate for both, but especially for the latter, the market is saturated, fewer and fewer are able to make any money in it. Also, it’s starting to unravel. The golden age is over and as devices become more powerful, Flash, HTML5, etc reduce the need to pay for apps.
HA! Low hanging fruit? I don’t wish your project ill, quite the opposite, but I predict you’ll be surprised.
Yes, these are good points in my experience as well, although not entirely. XCode has a shitload of issues, and Objective-C is mega weird. But, Objective-C works well and Apple’s SDK is robust and mostly easy to use. It’s no wonder as a Java developer that you hate iOS development, but I work with a lot of iOS developers who hate Java and Eclipse. So it’s got a lot to do with preference, in my opinion. I personally like Java better, but now that I’ve got a couple years of dealing with XCode’s flakiness under my belt I mostly forget about it. Now I mostly hate developing in Ruby on Rails.
Also, the iPhone will continue to make money, but it is no longer “low-hanging fruit.” Your game must be good and you must have an idea on how to market it. Because Cas has good games and a good number of fans, I think he’ll be fine, but it’s not going to make him a millionaire. If I made a random iOS game I’d make like $1000 maximum (trust me, I have literal experience with this) without marketing or a fan base.
It’s only got to turn a decent profit, and I think with the very high quality of the iPad market demographic that Revenge of the Titans could pretty easily bring in about $50k. That’s about 5,000 sales to a very concentrated, affluent, hungry market of several million devices, all of which run precisely the same hardware and software, and all of whom buy their apps from precisely one place with the click of a button.
Android by comparison … is just simply not comparable. CPU speed ranges between 500MHz and 1GHz dual core, RAM between 256MB to a gig, screens from 3" to 10", and worst of all, the OS itself is spread over about 4 major versions, and only the very latest one isn’t even remotely fast enough to run Revenge at anything approaching a sensible framerate. The JIT is like stepping back in time to Java 1.1, and those of us unlucky to remember how crap that was are probably still amazed Java caught on in spite of that. On top of the vast headache of a multiplicity of support, we can either limit ourselves to the top 10% of the market with a spec barely capable of running the game, or slash the game so badly in the quest for compatibility it just ends up being a lacklustre experience like so many other Android games. And then joy of joys we get to experience the Android Market, a teeming bazaar of people not wanting to pay much money for anything, if any, and which is delivered in a frankly mediocre experience compared to the iPad’s App Store.
There is nothing ideological in the comparison. I’m being a reasonably hard-nosed businessman. That’s why I’m laying tens of thousands of dollars down to get an iPad port done.
In highly portable C++ btw, not Obj-C.
Cas
I don’t disagree with you that there is a market for your game on iOS. It just isn’t all flowers in iOS land.
An OpenGL Android game in native code and would be a better comparison to C++. Sure, it is going to run slower if you write it in Java on Android, but development will take a fraction of the time, especially if you can port existing code. Even in Java, RotT could be made to work on anything better than a Droid, which is some 50% of the market based on this chart:
I agree the Android market is unfortunately not the place to cash in. I personally have the dream that if something really awesome was released that a guy could still make a decent amount.
Bleh, well, you can take me off the list then. Everything I have worked on has been on Obj-C. And in any case a certain number of OS calls and the like will need to be in Obj-C.
Something like 99.7% of apps sold for smartphones are sold on the iPhone.
As nice as Android is (and there are some truly brilliant Android devices out there), it’s still just a poor mans iPhone. Some Android devices are worthy of being liked to a Ferrari, but the iPhone is a Bugatti Veyron; the best. It’s that simple.
Yes, great discussing with you. :
Crappy hardware rofl… Sure, there are bad anrdoid phones, but it is a fact that high-end android devices are both much cheaper (like half the price of an iphone 4) and has better hardware than the iphone 4. The samsung galaxy s is about 6 months old and still has better hardware than the iphone 4. The android os is more customizeable and apple’s ridicolous censoring doesn’t exist on the market as well.
Ridiculous as it is it’s where the money is, end of.
Cas