Monster Madness for Android Shows Ease of Porting Titles [Video]
If you know anything about Android game development, you’d know that porting titles can sometimes be very costly in many ways. It consumes time, money, and other resources that studios could be putting toward creating their newest games. For this very reason, the gaming scene on Android wasn’t the greatest when it first launched.
A lot of time has passed since 2008, though, and the market had a breakout year in 2010. This is due largely in part to the advent of cross-platform game development engines adding support for Android. Some of the most popular iOS titles are now being ported to Android as the engines they use allow them to port their games in a very short amount of time. (Some have done it in as little as two days.)
Southpeak Studios shows us that you can go even further than that with a game that’s using an engine that does not yet have proper Android support. They created the title Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia. The game was originally released for the Xbox 360 and used the Unreal Engine to power its graphics and physics. As we know, Unreal is taking quite a long time to add Android support to their offering.
Even without official support, Southpeak told me they were able to port the title in a little under a month. I wasn’t afforded the full slate of details about how they did it, but the important thing is that they did it. I’m always glad to hear success stories like this because I know it’ll encourage more developers to port their titles knowing that the experience doesn’t have to be expensive and time consuming.
They showed me the game running on a Tegra 2 device – the Motorola ATRIX 4G. It’s about four years old and wasn’t the most demanding game in terms of graphics for its time, but it still surprised me just how fast they got this thing published for Android. There are tons of games on the Xbox Live marketplace that I can see being good ports for Android and I’m hopeful other studios will follow suit.
The game itself is pretty fun. It can be a bit mindless at times, but there’s a bit of substance to go along with it and things get a lot more fun as you collect more weapons and advance to different areas. You can find the Tegra 2-optimized game in the Android market today for $4.99.
