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[Nix]

A friend of mine (a computer science professor) has been bugging me to port a Flash game I made to mobile platforms. I own an Android device, so that would be pretty easy. I have a question for a) those of you who own mobile devices and buy games or b) those of you who have developed and sold games for mobile devices and have a good feel for the market: Do you think a port of my game Up would get purchases at $0.99? Even a just a few hundred would justify my time.

[dustin]

a) I personally wouldn't buy this just because the controls don't seem like they would work that well on a touchscreen.  For this type of game I want a d-pad.  Flash games that are %100 mouse work pretty well for me on a phone but keyboard driven ones I'm not big on.

b) my current flash game I'm porting to iphone/android at the moment so I'll let you know how it does once I release it.

[Tumetsu]

Your game is ok, I'm not sure if it would sell. However, should it be rather easy to port? I have dabbled with Air for Android and it wasn't that hard to convert my existing code to run on Android. Your game doesn't have too much going on, so I think FPS would be okay for it even on mobile platform. Only thing I would worry about is controls.

In short, I think porting shouldn't be too much work so it might be worth of it.

[Chromanoid]

Maybe you could port this with AIR to iOS. As far as I have seen stats for app sales Android versions get only ~25% of the revenue made with the iOS version. Also I dont think the graphics are very attractive to mobile gamers. IMO 3D gfx and an animal or human player character may add enough to get some decent sales.

What stats do you have for your Flash version?

[st33d]

Exporting for iOS is a colossal pain in the arse. Plus you can't guarantee it running at any kind of sensible speed.

I would do the Android job first. At least it will run as expected and you'll be simply redesigning the UI instead of trying to optimise the whole game.