1ft Startup

Quick — your eyes are rolling into the back of your head in your Introduction to Physics lecture hall, and you want to open up a game on your phone to kill the last 20 minutes of class. What’s the first thing you do when you flip open your phone?

If your answer was “make sure the sound is turned off so I don’t get caught / disturb the class, and sound on cell phone games suck anyway,” you’ll be happy to know that our first in-house game release, Mitosis, comes with that audio feature built in just for you; it has no sound. Here are a couple reasons why:

• Sound compatibility across handsets is more bug-prone than nearly any other porting problem, with the possible exception of networking code. As a small shop, we really only have about a half dozen phones that we can test on, which would severely limit us if we weren’t able to make a few assumptions. So why bother, if:
• As mentioned above, people really don’t care about sound in J2ME games! Of course in a sweeping generalization like that, there are bound to be people who disagree, but if you take a look at the polls on Midlet Review, game reviews anywhere, posts on the J2ME forums, you’ll find that people only ever complain about sound, never consider it positively. It’s dead last on everyone’s list. Anecdotally, nearly all of the people I see playing games on the subway, standing in line, in waiting rooms, do have the sound turned off.

That’s not to say that we’re a shop made of mimes and we’ll never do sound, and we’ll never try to do a really high-quality job on sound effects or music! For one thing, carriers may mandate that we add sound, or we may just miss it or feel like it’s very important to some particular game/app. For the time being, though, mum’s the word.

Caveat: Does not apply to iPod games! Those gadgets are obviously made for music, plus they’ve got no external speaker, so it’s a different, uh, game altogether.