An Open Love Letter to Our PC Fans

http://www.ironhidegames.com/post.php?id=103

by minimaxir • 12 years ago

92 101 12 years ago

ironhidegames.com

minimaxir2• 12 years ago

Key line that sticks out:

In three years we had made five versions of our two games. For each version, the programming was done from zero.

pjc502• 12 years ago

<strikethrough>Well, yes. Because mobile is such a walled garden of anticompetitive language and platform wars, it's hard to write portable applications. They eventually came round to Unity, which has a cost, but does let you deliver to all the platforms.</strikethrough>

Besides, it's only 2D tower defence. The artwork probably took longer than the game, and at least that's portable.

Then there's the question of which platform is most profitable. I've heard that the profitability order is iOS > Android > Web > PC for this kind of game. Maybe others have experience of this.

Edit: well, I guess there's no quicker way to get correct information than to post incorrect information!

NickPollard3• 12 years ago

C works just fine on all of the (non-web) platforms you mentioned. It might be a little long in the tooth for some, but it still gets the job done.

In my spare time by myself in the last 4 years I have built a complete cross platform engine from scratch for Desktop and Mobile. If one person can do it their spare time in 4 years, a couple of programmers working full time could do it a lot more quickly (I also deliberately reinvented the wheel in a lot of places I did not need to).

blub• 12 years ago

There's this thing called C++ which happens to work on all mobile platforms. I could understand having difficulty making a cross-platform app that needs deep OS integration but a game is the very definition of cross-platform.

bluedino• 12 years ago

Angry Birds came out in what, 2010? At some point it seemed like every device imaginable had an Angry Birds port.

bishnu• 12 years ago

Not all done by Rovio, however. Eg, Angry Birds for Windows Mobile was ported and maintained by Microsoft.

timdorr• 12 years ago

If they settled on Unity, why not make a PC version? It shouldn't involve ground-up rebuilding of everything. In fact, they've already targeted the most restrictive environment, so it's relatively downhill to produce. They could easily get it on to the Playstation and Xbox platforms as well.

atanasb• 12 years ago

I was wondering the exact same thing.

EDIT: Here's what they are saying about Unity:

"We never had a Unity port for Frontiers. Origins is coded in cocos2d, like all the other KR games. By the time Unity became known to us, we gave it a try with the Steam version of Kingdom Rush. This was mid 2013... Frontiers was almost ready by then. Early 2014 we started working on Origins and we used the old engine out, sine the effort of adapting the old games to new platforms wasn't exactly good to us. Origins is the last game that will use our old and loyal cocos2d engine. As we define what our next game will be, we are very much aware that it must be multi-platform."

shmerl3• 12 years ago

If they settled on Unity, why not make a PC version?

I guess they are too exhausted at this point. Even with Unity there are bugs specific to each platform and supporting that takes time.

socialist_coder4• 12 years ago

Not really. Going from Mobile back to PC is very very easy (PC to Mobile is another story). If your game already works on mobile, it will 99.9% work on PC. The amount of platform specific Unity bugs is actually quite small, in my experience. Especially with 2D games that aren't using crazy shaders (in my experience, most of the platform specific bugs are GPU shader crashes, especially on Android. And again, that's only on Android. PC has far less buggy GPU drivers than Android).

You might need to adjust some screens so they work better with a mouse instead of with taps, but this game doesn't use multi-touch or anything that can't be done with a mouse so I don't see an issue with that.

You also need to write platform specific IAP and notification code, but again, going to desktop you won't have notifications, and writing platform specific IAP code is not that big of a deal, especially compared to porting your entire game.

Short story is, these guys chose their engine very poorly. They had already experienced cross platform issues in the past, and seems like they just decided to ignore them until it was too late.

I have no sympathy.

desdiv• 12 years ago

Origins is another Kingdom Rush and being made with the same base mobile engine we allways used, not Unity. It will be released for iOS and Android probably at the same time [0]

They wrote Kingdom Rush first in flash, then ported it to iOS, then ported it to their own proprietary mobile engine that's portable across iOS and Android. Earlier this year, they also ported it to Unity.

This blog post is talking about their newest title, Kingdom Rush: Origins, which isn't built on Unity but still on their own proprietary mobile engine.

[0] http://www.ironhidegames.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5950...

smacktoward3• 12 years ago

They settled on Unity for future projects. Existing projects (like Origins) were all written in platform-specific code.

(At least, that's how it sounds to me.)

xsmasher• 12 years ago

Game co's often hire out the porting, so they can still exploit a platform without splitting their focus. Aspyr has made a living porting popular games to the mac.

dnlrn• 12 years ago

Aspyr also do a lot of the recent Linux ports. I love Aspyr!

Encosia2• 12 years ago

This seems potentially very shortsighted, as difficult as it must be to measure exactly how much of their success on mobile was due to the free advertising on Armor Games, in and out of game.

kemayo2• 12 years ago

As an anecdotal data point, I own the last few versions of the Kingdom Rush game on iOS, and I'd never even realized that they had a flash version until I read this post.

Encosia2• 12 years ago

Do you recall how you found the first version that you purchased? What I'm wondering is if the free marketing on sites like Armor Games was a key part of the initial push to be discoverable on the app store rankings. Of course, the existing mobile user base may all the captive audience they need to accomplish that at this point.

shmerl3• 12 years ago

This looks like a lesson in avoiding non portable technologies. Something like SDL + OpenGL could help preventing a lot of such problems.

teamhappy2• 12 years ago

I looked into 2D engines for iOS a couple of years ago and I remember reading on one of their websites that I shouldn't worry about porting to other platforms before the game has reached popularity. The context was probably Android and not PC, but still, this seems to be exactly what was going wrong here. If they would have chosen Unity (or any other cross-platform engine for that matter, e.g., Cocos2D-X) over Cocos2D-iPhone, there would be a PC version today.

This seems to be a bit of a recurring thing where we evaluate technologies wrong very early and punish ourselves in the long run. The fact that Twitter once was a Rails app comes to mind.

I can't recommend enough to write software for the best case scenario. You shouldn't have to replace your entire toolchain once the thing you dreamt about happening actually happens.

dageshi• 12 years ago

I kind of agree with their original thought, if the game can't succeed on one large platform then being portable is irrelevant. If it does succeed then porting is an additional cost but it's a cost you can weigh up and choose to do or not do, you have the choice. That seems like a better option than over encumbering yourself to begin with by adding in effect a bunch of additional cross platform requirements.

sehugg2• 12 years ago

Hindsight is 20/20. It was 2011 when they ported the Flash version to iOS, so Cocos2D-X had just been forked and Unity had just released its Android version. Cocos2D was what all the hit games were using at the time.

The game's popular enough that Activision did them the honor of cloning them for their recent Duck Dynasty game, so it's hard to say they screwed up that badly.

programminggeek• 12 years ago

Another way to look at it is that the requirements changed. When the requirement is multiplatform then you pick the best multiplatform solution, when the requirement is simply the best engine for a single platform, that's a totally different requirement.

It's not that the picked the wrong tool for the job, it's that the job changed.

teamhappy2• 12 years ago

I want to reply to all three of you, so I'm just gonna do it like that.

sehugg kind of got a point, but I think there were really good cross-platform solutions available back then. Just not the ones used today. Marmalade has been around for a quite while and it was/is used by a lot of big studios.

The other two comments I don't agree with.

It's not that the picked the wrong tool for the job, it's that the job changed.

If your tool can't adapt to new requirements an argument can be made that you did in fact pick the wrong tool in the first place. That's my point exactly.

That seems like a better option than over encumbering yourself to begin with by adding in effect a bunch of additional cross platform requirements.

I think this is a bit of an exaggeration. They don't write their own engine, so the overhead for going cross-platform is really, really small — so small that I have a hard time coming up with examples right now. Not hard coding screen sizes and that kind of thing might be one, but that's about it. There's also some irony in saying that's the better option given the blog post we're talking about.

huhtenberg2• 12 years ago

Weird. They should be sitting now on a wealth of experience to allow them to write the next version in a more-or-less portable fashion.

My guess would be that the actual reason might be the lack of reliable distribution channels and/or rampant piracy. Though there is Steam, which seems to work just fine for a lot of game devs...

VLM• 12 years ago

"Though there is Steam"

Google for steam tower defense

click steam web page link

"Showing 1-10 of 101 results"

Trying to be the 102nd competitor. That's tough. I can see the disinterest. Can you split a very old market 102 ways while making a profit? Frankly, probably not.

bjt• 12 years ago

You've got to sell your games where the users are. It's not like there's less competition on the iOS and Android marketplaces.

huhtenberg2• 12 years ago

In theory KR is a TD game. In practice though most of TD games is such a crap that Kingdom Rush pretty much sits in its own category. They should have no problem whatsoever getting to the top spot on Steam.

ghshephard2• 12 years ago

Kingdom Rush is totally separate calibre of Game. I've played probably 20-30 Tower Defense games, and KR keeps you coming back because of the incredible attention to quality, details, balanced game play, etc...

debacle• 12 years ago

Do these games have a large following? I tried to play one once and found it to be a pretty typical "You've played a few levels, now you have to pay to win."

maudineormsby• 12 years ago

Definitely not necessary to pay to play these games. Makes it easier, sure, but they don't have timers or super high difficulty spikes to overcome, except maybe the last level.

riffraff• 12 years ago

Mobile versione might differ, but I played it on kongregate (yay flash) and you could get to the end without paying anything.

minimaxir2• 12 years ago

The launch of the original Kingdom Rush on iOS had zero IAP elements; they were only added in later.

The game is definitely not pay-to-win, although there is low flexibility in strategy. (You must use all 4 types of base units.)

smilekzs• 12 years ago

IIRC you can and are supposed to (at higher difficulty) beat levels without using all 4

wmeredith2• 12 years ago

Aren't these the guys advertising during NFL games? I hope they have a large following.

wnevets2• 12 years ago

with kate upton? Thats a totally different company/game.

wmeredith2• 12 years ago

EDIT: Ah, I see. Totally different company.

wnevets2• 12 years ago

That wasn't the case with the flash version, I never paid a nickel and completed most of the challenges and the game. I recently bought Frontiers for Android and while the game has "heroes" and "gems" for sale, I havent had to buy anything to beat levels.

pliu• 12 years ago

Definitely not the case. I have played through all the Kingdom Rush games, fully and doing all the bonus objectives, without spending a dime beyond the initial purchase. I had a great time too, and I have a pretty low tolerance for grind. I think the KR games are exceptionally well designed in this regard.

socialist_coder4• 12 years ago

This game is definitely not pay to win. In my opinion, the challenge level is perfect. With a bit of practice, you should be able to beat every level. Then, going back and 3 starring every level will take more skill and practice and maybe some light item usage (which you can earn via playing, since you only need to use them occasionally).

If someone is really that bad at the game that they can't even win without using a ton of items per level, then yes, it's pay to win. But if it wasn't pay to win, they would just be stuck and couldn't play at all.

The game isn't freemium either, and it's not designed to be pay to win (I'm a successful freemium game developer).

Do these games have a large following? It's widely considered to be one of the best tower defense games on iOS.

benmcnelly• 12 years ago

This is why I am such a advocate of Unity, I know it didn't work out for them, but if you stage it right you can easily port to about anything worth porting to. I tend to start out with Desktop since it has the highest curve for quality and performance, and go from there.

TillE• 12 years ago

The great thing is that there are a ton of good cross-platform options available now, not just Unity. From commercial alternatives like UE4 to solid open-source libraries like SDL2, or just using OpenGL ES.

If you have even the slightest inclination to release on multiple platforms, you should be building it as cross-platform from the beginning. There are very few reasons not to.

frandroid• 12 years ago

QOTD: What are we going to do for the next year? Eat pizza until we learn to speak Italian by osmosis?

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

I've heard this a lot in the games industry -- "For each version, the programming was done from zero. We can’t stress this enough."

That seems so wasteful and challenging, anyone from the industry care to comment on how a studio would get itself into a situation of effectively zero reuse of their code?

NickPollard3• 12 years ago

The main issue is a lack of money/long-term survivability for most studios, which leads them to cut many corners in order to release the game before running out of cash. This means that code is written to ship the game out of the door, rather than for the future, so there often isn't time for proper engineering. Then if that game does OK they get to work on the next one, throw away all the hacks they did last time, and start again...

It also doesn't help that due to the structure of the industry (e.g. work hours, low pay etc.) they have trouble retaining developers and instead replace them with fresh grads. A huge percentage of people I know left the industry before they hit 30 (myself included). This leads to a lack of experienced engineers.

eropple6• 12 years ago

I'm going to preface this post with a note that, yes, there are surely good developers in game development, this is not a universal thing, etcetera etcetera.

Ass properly covered, I'll be real: I'm never surprised to see this because "code reuse" is generally the sign of reasonably advanced developers and I don't know a single person in game development I would hire for a role outside of it. It's not just NIH--that's a problem but one slowly going away. It's more just a fundamental lack of understanding of software engineering and building Good Code. As time goes on I've seen gamedev acquaintances poorly reinvent most of the wheels that the rest of the world takes for granted--even something as simple as serialization for save data and network transport (but no schematic validation, because "schemas suck") was trumpeted to me as this Big Crazy Great Thing. Which contextually it may be, but I kind of feel like the state of the art for stuff not involving pointer munging is about a decade behind everybody else.

So, code reuse? Gotta make good code first.

alexnking• 12 years ago

Well there's a difference between code reuse, and cross-platform code reuse. If you're porting a Laravel project to Rails or vice versa, you should be reusing logic, not code.

pmelendez• 12 years ago

I worked in the gaming industry for a couple of years and after I worked in the RTB industry and lately in the forex industry. I am not alone, and I have a lot of friends coming out of gaming that work very well in other industries.

The problem is not whether or not game developers know how to reuse code but whether or not it makes sense or are allowed to reuse it. One big challenge when you are going to reuse code is not having a stable set of requirements (which in gaming is almost non existing even in the late stage of a project) and when you take that and join it with tight and unreasonable schedules you would have a huge mess as result.

The state of the industry is very unhealthy in my opinion and I wouldn't be surprise if there is another dark age for videogames coming up.

SimpleMinds2• 12 years ago

I agree with what you said with my limited experience. I hope it's anecdotal nature is good enough.

I worked in a company that went from doing software gigs in general to be full mobile gaming company. Before it was quite standard Agile style company: Scrum, code reviews, TDD, cross-functional teams (front end devs knew how servers works in general), focus on quality over quantity (one dev, rotated weekly or biweekly, focusing on fixing bugs), separate concerns.

After going full game-oriented, company hired couple of people from gaming industry into higher positions - tech leads, project managers etc. Over couple of months, people with many years of experience in those big companies dismantled what was standard for me, using combination of two arguments:

- big names don't do it, so it must be wrong - it's a waste of time

Before I quit, there were no longer code reviews (waste of time), all testing was to be handled by QA team (waste of valuable dev time), ship with issues (waste of time to fix minor bugs when can add features), single system responsibility (one dev to write code for client server protocols, one dev for UI, one dev for assets etc, that's gow big names do it).

At one of the last talks with "industry veteran", when I mentioned those things - and how negative, in my opinion, those changes are, his response was "so you are saying that whole gaming industry dev practice is wrong". At that point I thought he's right and I sound full of crap, now I believe that yes, AAA companies are simply bad development practises shops.

My guess as to why is because AAA is very strongly driven by deadlines and marketing, where you cannot simply delay release (Christmas shopping spree is coming). This idea I saw articulated on HN first and I agree with it.

smacktoward3• 12 years ago

This seems unsurprising, given the game industry's notorious reputation for developer burnout. The developers don't know how to write good code because by the time they've learned they've burned out and left the industry. They're then replaced by clueless young people, and the cycle repeats.

highCs3• 12 years ago

Almost all the graphics, audio, net, event, ui, system calls and data structures are generally tied to the low level frameworks without any level of virtualization.

Add to that that each framework has its own standard and way of doing games (event-base, component-base, etc.). The worse part I think is the game logic is generally enclosed in framework-specific objects like events in as3, components in unity, etc.

Virtualizing that would be expensive, tricky and costy in terms of performance.

jfoutz• 12 years ago

I am genuinely surprised that a flash game is so tightly coupled to the underlying hardware.

That's amazing.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

In the way back times, when the Amiga was a hot machine, I hung out with folks who were games people and they were always trying get one more erg of power out of the machine because, as they put it, "Every cpu cycle spent on the game makes it that much better." Which was clearly true in the Amiga, and the PC/AT and Macintosh II, but for a modern machine with 4 cores and 8GB of memory and a GPU that fills a 1080p screen with triangles almost without thinking about it. It seems like 'bare metal' is suddenly a hindrance and 'moving to multiple platforms with minimal rewrite' would be the thing evolution would push into game studios. Where did that message get lost?

pjmlp• 12 years ago

The game industry grew up in the 80's where the only suitable language to write games on was Assembly and everything computer was completely different, even between revisions.

Basic, C and Pascal were the Python and Ruby back then.

So porting studios appeared, specializing in porting the games to specific platforms. The porting industry came to life.

Fast forward 30 years, you still need to write quite hardware specific code if you wish to squeeze out every possible ms out of the machine, which opens the door for all kinds of shortcuts.

This of course only matters when doing AAA games.

sehugg2• 12 years ago

Let's say it's 2011 and you want to port your Flash game to iPhone. You can try packaging your Flash game using Adobe's tools, but it'll probably be very slow, and Apple might change their mind again about allowing Flash apps on the platform. There aren't very many well-supported C/C++ frameworks for iPhone yet -- you search the forums for each and only find unanswered questions. You're worried about it working well on the new iPad.

So you do the safe thing everyone else is doing, Cocos2D and Objective C. You'll worry about porting later, if the game does well. Maybe you'll just pay someone else to do it.

NDizzle3• 12 years ago

I'm going to paraphrase a friend of mine who is a great mobile developer.

They could have used AIR on mobile to re-use the AS3 codebase. Alternately, they could have done c++ on cocos2d-x instead of objective c, so that would have been pc portable.

They would just have to write it twice, in that case. However, if you are a group of AS3 devs jumping to mobile, they probably picked the best sounding thing at the time - which was cocos2d.

Keep in mind android wasn't really a game platform in 2011, so choosing cocos2d in obj-c over c++ wasn't really a bad call.

carlmcqueen• 12 years ago

While I think it's sad that PC support is finished I certainly get their point about feeling exhausted.

On the other hand, the use of bold and non-bold was driving me nuts. I feel it's up to the reader to decide what is important in the text, not the making of certain sections of bold, it was hard for me to read.

After awhile, as I wanted to read the whole thing, I copied into a text editor to read.

doodpants• 12 years ago

They did not say that they are finished supporting the PC, just that there won't be a PC port of one specific game.

throw7• 12 years ago

Thumbs down. Those answers were disingenuous:

Should we make a PC version? Absolutely!

cool.

Can we make it? Nope.

should have been Yes.

Are we focusing solely on mobile from now on? Not at all.

Nice misdirection. The question should have been:

Did we decide to focus solely on mobile? Yes.

Then the rest of the article explaining why.

socialist_coder4• 12 years ago

100% Agreed. They had already been bitten by cross platform issues in the past, and instead of deciding to address them and choose a cross platform game engine for their new game, they just ignored them.

Short story is, they chose their engine poorly, and are now making excuses. Very disingenuous blog post.

ebbv• 12 years ago

To me this post reads as "We were really surprised by our success and have been running in circles." They've foolishly made a ton of versions instead of learning how to write cross-platform or at the very least how to port from the beginning. Crazy.

schnevets• 12 years ago

Meh. I always assumed mobile game companies ported to PCs just to squeeze more product out of their creation. You might as well complain about your favorite Game Boy game not being ported to the SNES (with 4 shades of olive green graphics).

brute• 12 years ago

Bad example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Game_Boy

NDizzle3• 12 years ago

These guys need to really study the recent information put out from Microsoft about how they make Office for as many platforms as they do.

I think a lot could be done to make the core of the game more portable. It's just not being done for one reason or another.

FroshKiller2• 12 years ago

Well, you could start by linking to it yourself.

NDizzle3• 12 years ago

Sorry, here is the discussion of the video:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8678936

dashboardfront• 12 years ago

I like how there are commenters who feel entitled to a PC version.

tehwalrus2• 12 years ago

I do wonder why more people don't make use of a C physics engine (portable everywhere, including browsers via asm.js), and code the logic in a higher level language which can compile down to C (like Python via Cython.)

I guess the problem is that you need different rendering code? OpenGL works on PC and mobile, but you'd need to mock it out for WebGL. Has someone already done this for asm.js?

Presumably there is some other huge hole in my thinking...

highCs3• 12 years ago

That is the goal of Haxe[1] I've always thought it is a good idea. That may be under appreciated.

[1] http://haxe.org/

tehwalrus2• 12 years ago

That looks awesome, and not just for games. Thanks for the recommendation!

wtracy2• 12 years ago

Haxe looks really cool, but the last time I looked at it, the documentation left a lot to be desired (most of it assumed familiarity with the Flash drawing APIs).

It does look like the situation has improved since then, but I'm guessing that documentation is a big reason for Haxe being so underappreciated.

Steko• 12 years ago

Doesn't Blue Stacks work fine for Android emulation on PC?

BTW IGN is giving away Kingdom Rush Frontiers promo codes for iOS, limited availability.

ourmandave• 12 years ago

I've never played Kingdom Rush, et al, but I've read reviews of some games that were ported to the PC and the keyboard / mouse control were almost unplayable.

Or they highly recommend you play with a gamepad.

pdknsk• 12 years ago

I don't think that's the whole story. Most likely the numbers just don't add up for IAP-less Steam versions. Kingdom Rush Steam sells for $9.99 (and was available for less if you pre-ordered). I don't know about Origins, but Frontiers has obscene IAP price-wise. Purchasing all heroes costs $40 or so, plus there is always the opportunity to buy gems for items which make it easier to progress. (Gems also accumulate as you beat levels). In fairness, this is all optional and you can beat the game without it. They kept adding increasingly difficult post-game levels though, which no doubt have tempted many to buy stronger heroes.

PS. I think they should fix the bugs in KR Steam first anyway, which was pretty much abandoned.

ghshephard2• 12 years ago

I've completed everything in Frontiers, mostly through Origins. It's a lot of fun (after settlers, my most favorite iPad game) - and it never even occurred to me to do an IAP.

smacktoward3• 12 years ago

I like the Kingdom Rush games a lot, and wish Ironhide Games nothing but further success.

That being said, this letter is cloying. A letter where you tell someone you care about that you don't have it in you to be with them isn't a love letter, it's a "Dear John" letter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_John_letter). For the recipient, those two types of letter are very different!

It would have been 100% fine to just say "look, it would take a huge effort to bring Origins to PC, and we don't have the money or the energy for that." There's no need to dress it up in shiny happy "we love PC!" platitudes.

An Open Love Letter to Our PC Fans

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