MsMobileNews.com'Who are you and what do you do?'
Alien Invention:My name is Jonathan Smith aka Midnight, and I design and do the graphics for Microsoft Smartphone games for a games company called Alien Invention.
MsMobileNews.com'How long has you company been involved making games?'
Alien Invention:We are a brand new company with Eclipse: First Wave being our first game, we did start Kumite before Eclipse was started however, but that was put on hold due to problems with the SPV E200.
MsMobileNews.com'Which of your games do you enjoy playing the most?'
Alien Invention:Probably Eclipse. I've been playing that for almost 3 months for testing etc. and I'm still not fed up with it yet, but Kumite is good fun aswell :)
MsMobileNews.com'Do you own a smartphone? if so which one?'
Alien Invention:I currently own an original SPV (Canary) and an E100 (Tanager)
MsMobileNews.com'Which phone do you use as your day to day phone?'
Alien Invention:That would be the E100, nice solid phone, never crashes and 3 days battery life. The battery on my original SPV is a bit dodgy and I only get around 1 day standby.
 MsMobileNews.com 'What where your first impressions of the smartphone? Most people I have spoken to had very low opinions of it until they used it, and now they all have a smartphone'
Alien Invention:I think there's a lot of misconceptions about the phone. People saying it crashes a lot, hard to use, too big, too heavy. While each of these are true in some form or other, they are not nearly as bad as what people think.
Crashes are rare, and are usually caused by an application doing something it shouldnt be doing rather than the operating system itself. When you first use the phone it may appear difficult, because this is not Symbian, but after literally 5 minutes everything becomes second nature. I suppose it is a little on the large size, but what do you expect from a screen the size it is, but looking at the MPx100 for example, I would say that Smartphone sizes will come down over time.
MsMobileNews.com'Do you think that smartphones will replace
the low end PDA market? And if so how long do you think it will be before Smartphones and PDA's merge as one?'
Alien Invention:I don't think it will ever replace the PDA for the next few years, there's argument for and against both devices, the PDA is better for large amounts of data input, but the Smartphone is just that, a phone, simpler, smaller.
I only think that the PDA and the Smartphone will really be as one until an alternative input method that doesn't require a keyboard or stylus becomes available, and I would have thought that voice recognition would be the natural input method for a mobile communications device.
MsMobileNews.com'Can an all in one device such as a Smartphone succeed against its separate counterparts (MP3 player, camera, pda etc)' Alien Invention:Absolutely. As costs come down we will see much higher capacity storage, which is the thing you need for proper music/video use, and cameras on mobile phones are getting better all the time and wont be long before we see
4 megapixel and beyond.
MsMobileNews.com'As a mobile gaming platform, do you think the smartphone platform is viable, comparing it to all the JAVA, BREW and N Gauge/symbian based platforms?'
Alien Invention:As a games developer I would actually say not only can it compete, but given time can beat anything that the N Gage can throw out. As it stands I'd say that the Microsoft Smartphone's gaming power could be comparable to maybe the Nintendo Gameboy Advance, maybe slightly better at some things, and worse at others. As you can see from Eclipse, we are using the maximum number of colours available onscreen (65K), hundreds of sprites, alpha effects, parallax scrolling, full sound effects, music and many other things running at a frame rate much better than that of your average Java/Brew game, and all this on a standard, bottom of the range Canary device.
MsMobileNews.com'When do you think Microsoft Smartphone will possess the power to run 3D games ?'
Alien Invention:It can run 3D games now, just not great ones :) If you mean 3D acceleration, I can see that coming around Q4 this year, and hopefully we'll be one of the early adopters of this technology.
MsMobileNews.com'Out of the current smartphone games released by other developers, which do you play?'
Alien Invention:I actually don't play that many games from other developers, not on the Smartphone at least. I suppose the best games would probably be Toki Tori and Boxy Pocket, I'm not impressed by the quality of many of the current crop of Microsoft Smartphone games, hopefully that will soon change.
MsMobileNews.com'The smartphone market is mostly aimed at men, have you developed or plan to develop software which is aims to attract more women to smartphones?'
Alien Invention:Well we have figured out the Vibration stuff on the Smartphone, so who knows :D, but seriously, we currently don't really have any plans for anything specific, but if any of the female Smartphone owners out there have ideas for games they would like to play they can contact us and tell us their ideas, we are always happy to listen to others to see what type of games they would like to see.
 MsMobileNews.com'Now that we have windows mobile 2003 with .net framework on the latest phones, do you think it's a good thing for development? Or do you think java is better suited to mobile gaming'
Alien Invention:I'd say for mobile gaming currently java has the advantage (although I'd say
C++ is the best language to write in as its the fastest for games), but,
when mobile DirectX comes along .net will shoot ahead allowing for 2D and 3D games to be written with relative ease, still wont replace C++ though. But for application development, .net is by far the better choice due to its cross platform integration with Windows.
MsMobileNews.com'Will we be seeing more ports of pocketpc games on the smartphone platform?'
Alien Invention:I think that's all down to the original developers, but we are in talks with several companies to bring some older games to the Smartphone platform, unfortunately at this time I cannot mention any names. We are doing things a little different to other PocketPC and Smartphone developers however. Most developers write their games for the PocketPC, then shrink/butcher their games so they work on the Smartphone. But we work the other way around. We first develop the games on the Smartphone, maximising its potential, then are creating enhanced versions for the PocketPC. This way no-one can feel as though they have an inferior version and we maximise the potential of both devices.
MsMobileNews.com'Out of all the classic video games that have been released in the past 30 years; things like pacman, space invaders moving on to things like double dragon and outrun, up to modern games like street fighter and tekken, which would you like to see on a mobile platform?'
Alien Invention:I think out of all games, the one that has inspired me the most recently has been R-Type, and that's where much of the inspiration for Eclipse has come from, but the game I'd really like to see has to be Gran Turismo, which is the perfect racing game.
MsMobileNews.com'Can you give us any news or gossip on upcoming Smartphones games you have in production?'
Alien Invention:Besides Kumite, there is also another shoot-em-up planned, and I'm hoping to start some kind of racing game, and at some point we will be doing a much improved follow-up to Kumite.
all images © 2004 alien invention used with permision
 |
