Case Study
What's your role within FinBlade?
I'm Steve Longhurst Technical Director and lead programmer of FinBlade. I have 7 years mobile programming experience across all the major platforms, with more than 15 published titles as lead programmer for iomo, Infospace and FinBlade.
How long have you been using Bedrock?
We have used Bedrock since late 2007, using it to replace our previous in-house development/porting platform. Almost everything we've shipped since then has been developed on Bedrock, totalling 4 fully ported J2ME/BREW titles, 3 iPhone+Android games and 4 iPhone only titles with 3 current projects using Bedrock.
Which recent products were built on Bedrock?
We developed iPhone Battleship for EA using Bedrock. Battleship features the classic mode gameplay that most people are probably familiar with, and an extended 'super weapons' mode with 12 enhanced weapons like the Sky Sword, a satellite based laser! The game was developed using OpenGL ES for all 2D visuals and 3D cutscenes, and also includes multiplayer with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Pass'n'Play. Development time was 5 1/2 months from concept to QA complete.
Were there any particular challenges that Bedrock helped tackle?
Multiplayer network code is always a challenge to write and debug, but using Phoney means this process is just as efficient as the rest of development. Bedrock allows you to easily integrate C++ and native code with your project, and we produced iPhone Wi-Fi and Bluetooth modules to include with the actual device builds.
A time saving benefit that Bedrock afforded us was the reuse of the AI Java code from the existing J2ME Battleship game almost unchanged.
Bedrock is excellent for allowing programmers to use their existing J2ME/Java skills, along with their familiar PC development environment, to create titles for many different platforms including iPhone. Its rich support for many J2ME features including JSR-239 OpenGL ES 3D, and JSR-256 Sensors API and JSR-135 Multimedia API means that a very large part of your code is completely platform neutral.
