When considering a platform for a game, I’ve decided on multi-platform (Win/Lin/Mac) but can’t make up my mind as far as browser vs. desktop. As I’m not all too far in development, and now having second thoughts, I’d like your opinion!
Browser-based games using Java applets:
- market penetration is reasonably high (for version 6, it’s somewhere around 60% I believe?)
- using JOGL, 3D performance/quality is decent; certainly good enough to render the crappy 3D graphics that I make
- there’s the (small?) possibility of porting something to Android
- great for an audience of gamers who switch computers often; can sit down at any computer, load a webpage and play it
- also great for casual gamers or less knowledgeable gamers who are quite happy with playing games in a browser but don’t want to install more things to their computer
- written in a high-level language which I am more familiar with than C++ – but at the same time, I would like to improve my skills with C++ as it is probably where I am headed in the game industry once I get out of school…
- easier update process: reload the page.
Desktop games using good ol’ C++ and OpenGL
- 100% market penetration, assuming complete cross-platform; however, that number reduces when you consider how many people will go through downloading and installing an executable compared to just browsing to a webpage and hitting “yes” to a security warning.
- more trouble to maintain the cross-platform; but again, for learning purposes I would embrace the challenge and the knowledge I would gain
- better performance all around
- true full screen, whereas browser games often struggle with smooth full screen graphics (especially on Linux, in my experience)
- can take advantage of distribution platforms such as Steam
- more likely to be considered a “real” game, whereas browser and Java games are often dismissed as not being real games and therefore not played by “hardcore gamers”
- installer can be large; don’t have to worry so much about download times
Is there a way to have the best of both worlds? I love Java applets, but I also really like the reasons to write a desktop game. I don’t want to constantly port everything between a Java applet project and a C++ project; that would be twice the work!
Unity chose to write their own web player plugin. I don’t like this, because I am one of the people that will not install their web player for anything, and I don’t see myself being able to convince my audience to install a browser plugin.
What are my options? Are there other examples out there besides Unity, of games that have browser and desktop versions? Did I leave out anything in the pro/con lists above?
Yes you can have the best of both worlds.
It’s perfectly possible to write a Java application that will run in both an applet (for your online users) while also running as a standalone application in downloaded form.
The key technologies are:
If it’s any use, an old game I wrote called Tyrant supported running both as an applet and as a standalone downloaded .jar file, all the source is open if you want to look at it. This used simple AWT rather than 3D graphics.
And finally here’s another example of converting an applet into an application with a pretty minimal amount of code.