Naturally, I would just go on and say nice things about android development. True is, the Helldorado Team development team confesses that due to deployment issues we have faced in the past week, we will rethink our original strategy of picking Android as our development platform of choice.
We made it abundantly clear in the past that we had chosen Android because we were familiar with Java and because I was going to buy an Android phone (Samsung Galaxy S). That was back in Fall 2010, Android’s popularity was rising and its outlook was somewhat promising. But now its Fall 2012, there’s countless Android devices, API Levels, etc and honestly it is getting really hard to support every single permutation of Android phone and API Level. Props to Chris Pruett for what he was able to achieve with Replica Island. He is kind of an unsung hero in the Android development community, but honestly Helldorado Team is not hear to play the same role. We are not here to prove anything to anyone. We are not here to prove that we can write code that can run smoothly and without crashes on every available device, we are here just to create fun, playable games. We don’t need this headache. We realized that the reduced development time that came from our previous familiarity with Java is being offset by increased maintenance efforts post-deployment. We are currently a team of two. Elioncho is running a restaurant full-time, and I am currently pursuing an MBA. We are both extremely busy and we want to use our valuable time creating quality games, not debugging the reason why the Option screen crashes when you press back button on the Xperia phone while this works perfectly fine on a countless array of other devices.
We are now venturing into iPhone development, it will take at least a pair of months to get up to speed, but depending on how the development and deployment of Condor Wars for iPhone goes, we will make appropriate decisions regarding our platform or choice. If everything goes smoothly, Android will cease to be our platform of choice and will just be a pile of dust left behind (Sorry Pebo).