What do the Wii and iPhone have in common?

Virtually nothing ... except for the potential that maybe anyone in the world can code games for them.

Maybe.

There's a decent amount of excitement about coding games for the Wii via the Opera browser. Well, the iPhone can apparently run widgets - those things that are constantly surfing the web for you in the background of OS X.

First, some disclosure. I spent the better part of the day coding a Dashboard widget today. And one thing - it rocks. Really, I wish Apple had this good of sample code setup for games and iTunes plugins. They are very versatile and sparkle with that AJAX clean. Safari is very sophisticated browser - and the Dashboard environment is an enhanced version just for widgets. I never thought I'd want to code one, but now that I've mostly completed one - I kinda want to code one again.

So how well would it work for games? Well, honestly a lot better than some alternatives. Widgets have access to plugins like Flash and Cocoa objects (remember that the Unity engine is capable of porting out to a widget). Even without rich media, though, you can take advantage of DHTML and a version of the canvas tag.

Course the flip side is performance. Remember, I played with canvas tags before. And I'm just not a big fan of Flash games. Something about playing something in a box that's in a box. And we're talking about a phone here - I can't imagine it would have much juice.

Course, not all game design requires high perfomance. Working on a roguelike definately emphasizes this fact. Plus, nobody even has this thing in their hands yet. For all we know, it will be a choice number of widgets that Apple selects and lets iPhone users download.

I do know this - if that iPhone plays iTunes games before my Mac does ... I may well scream.


Apple has a decent selection of Dashboard games which I'll have to investigate further. I think a lack of keyboard might hurt this as well.


tagged: apple, gaming