Holden Racing Team Championship 2004 J2ME

1
Holden Racing Team Championship 2004 J2ME

• Postmortem Holden Racing Team Championship 2004
  J2ME
• Asian Game Developers Summit
• 12th October 2005
• Joo Yong Chin
• ycjoo1_at_gmail.com

2
Introduction

• Holden Racing Team Championship 2004 was one of
  the Top 5 downloads in Australian's major
  aggregators
• Publisher Atari
• Developer Tantalus Asia

3
Development Time and Human Resource

• Total development time 2 months
• Total human resource
• 3 programmers
• 1 Tool programmer
• 2 Core programmer
• 1 artist
• Deliverables include a Nokia series 40, series
  60, Sony Ericsson 128x160 MIDP 1.0 and a Sony
  Ericsson 176x220 MIDP 1.0 version

4
Tools Used

• Eclipse 3.0
• Tools
• Game
• Various dev kits from phone manufacturers
• Nokia
• Sony Ericsson
• Sun's Wireless Toolkit

5
Main Game

• Simulated perspective projection
• Drawing strips onto the screen
• Fixed point math involved as J2ME doesn't support
  floating point

6
Technical Issues

• Limited speed and memory of some phones
• Porting
• Devices not doing what was advertised
• Features of the API implemented differently
  across machines and manufacturers, particularly
  the optional ones
• Specific devices (even same manufacters) have
  different implementations
• Excessive memory leaks
• MIDP 1.0 not too suitable to do games

7
Solutions

• Scalable engine
• Same builds across different machines with
  different specs same resources, same codes
• Different builts made for specific machines
• Forgo a lot of OOP methodologies and adopting a
  lot of static or public variables

8
Postmortem (I)

• Design of the game built around the limitations
  of the phones
• Speed up development time
• Lesser hardware issues
• Same builds for different machines with different
  specs
• Unbalanced design

9
Postmortem (II)

• Product specifically tailored around Holden in
  Australia
• Australian tracks
• Very strong IP
• Strong publisher Atari
• Lump sum rather than profit sharing
• Allows for merchandising wallpapers for
  handphones

10
About the Mobile Games Industry in Malaysia

• Booming
• Trends
• Producing for IP brands
• Producing for international publishers
• Producing in quantities suffers in quality
• Producing for local market and distributing using
  own portals
• Side business rather than a main one
• Lower learning curve and lower start up costs

11
The Mobile Games Industry as A Whole

• Focus shifting to China
• Gameloft, Ubisoft, etc have centers there
• Products are tailor made with China in mind
• From J2ME to BREW
• Advantages of BREW
• Biling
• More standardised API
• GSM to CDMA and WCDMA
• Tying in with strong IP's is the most profitable
  way
• Ports from games or IP's from other entertainment
  industries

12
End...

• Thank you!
• Joo Yong Chin
• ycjoo1_at_gmail.com