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Comment by talloaktrees | Hacker News Reader

I have just finished porting my Android game Superior Tactics (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.jrenner.su...) to iOS using RoboVM.

It's amazing to me that I can write my game completely in Java and get a performant AOT compiled version that runs on iOS.

RoboVM really is amazing for indie game devs, and it's open source. I've already donated around $300 to the project.

I've also done tests to see if other JVM languages work with RoboVM. So far, I have been able to get games written in Kotlin running. Can you imagine writing a game in a nice modern JVM language like Kotlin or Scala, and then being able to publish it to PC, Android , HTML5 and iOS? That's what is possible now, and all with open source.

Obviously, for those who develop non-game apps, native UI concerns mean you can't just publish the same thing to both Android and iOS, but for games that isn't an issue.

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> native UI concerns mean you can just publish the same thing to both Android and iOS

That's a myth often seen in "deploy everywhere" mobile dev tools, in reality the design habits/guidelines between the two platforms have a lot of difference and you need a separate UI layer for each more often than not.

Doesn't change the awesomeness of RoboVM, but it had to be said.

Sorry, that was actually I a typo on my part, I meant to write "can't"

> the design habits/guidelines between the two platforms have a lot of difference and you need a separate UI layer for each more often than not

Phonegap is a great tool for writing code once (html5 & javascript) & deploying to many platforms with native capabilities.

I suspect it's not quite there for games, however it has great performance for most CRUD apps.

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Re: RoboVM, I suspect there will be libraries that will properly use iOS-like UI. Some logic branches will be required, however the main flow is centralized and DRY.

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There's also cross platform, openGL based tools. If you are making an openGL game, you minimize your need to use the native UI.

http://coronalabs.com/products/corona-sdk/

I'm curious : what parts of your game code were you able to reuse on the ios version ( apart from obvious things such as the game logic itself) ? Network ? Opengl libs ? Sound libs ?

RoboVM create bindings for most of the iOS API, and there are also bindings being created for 3rd party libs [0]. LibGDX [1] have done their own too.

I created a game [2] in LibGDX for Android, set it up on the Mac, right clicked and it just worked. Not deployed to the app store yet but I will be doing.

I just released my latest Augmented Reality "game" [3] on Google Play which uses Vuforia [4] for the AR, and am in the process of writing the RoboVM bindings for it. Once I've finished that I'll submit it back to robovm-ios-bindings so you should be able to write AR apps for iOS and Android at the same time.

[0] https://github.com/BlueRiverInteractive/robovm-ios-bindings

[1] http://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.simplyappe...

[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.simplyappe...

[4] https://developer.vuforia.com/

What are you using for a game framework? libgdx?

what tools did you use to create your game assets?

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