BOOK: Games on Symbian OS

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Attention game developers, professional and amateur alike! I wanted to give you a heads up about a new book called Games on Symbian OS: A Handbook for Mobile Development that’s coming out this week.

The book, by Jo Stichbury, is an overview of developing games for the Symbian operating system, including an overview of the mobile games industry, key aspects of both writing games for and porting games to Symbian, chapters on audio, graphics, and multiplayer, and other exciting, computer nerd stuff.

Also included is a chapter on the N-Gage platform written by our product management team featuring Peter Nielsen and Roland Geisler. This portion of the book covers the history of the platform, the current application, and offers a deeper look into the N-Gage SDK and just what it all means for a game developer.

Here’s a snip:

“The set of S60 phones that are N-Gage compatible will grow to add more phones and, of those, a large number of additional phones will come to market after a game is shipped. How is the developer to implement the game code? How is the developer to implement the game code?

It would require a logic flow that that takes into consideration the behavior of each N-Gage phone (current and future) so that the game can adjust the graphics for the screen mode and input keys accordingly.

As you expand the number of devices the decision tree for handling all this logic becomes untenable in a single SKU. When using the N-Gage SDK, a developer does not have to manage all this logic, since it is handled for them at a platform level.”

There’s plenty more, take a look at the Amazon page for details.