The BitBull Blog

Recently it has become abundantly clear that the JavaME platform, from which I’ve been deriving a living for more than ten years, is no longer going to be viable platform for a mobile gaming company to support, let alone rely on for a main income stream.

In Spring this year I decided to take the plunge and port all of my library code to Xamarin/Monogame so that, going forward, I can (in theory) develop across the Android, iOS and WinPho platforms with pretty much a single codebase.

There were a number of reasons for choosing Xamarin over other cross-platform solutions such as Marmalade, but the key one was the ability to code in C# which would make the porting of my extremely large (you may read ‘bloated’) existing codebase significantly easier.

I can’t say the process has been easy – there has been much weeping and gnashing of teeth, but overall I am pleased with the Xamarin/Monogame solution. The ‘single codebase’ promise is working out in practice and I find C# a great language to work with.

My first game built ‘from the ground up’ for Monogame has just been released on the App Store and Google Play. Floppy Frog is a deliberately challenging endless jumpy platformer inspired by the likes of Frogger, Flappy Bird, Doodle Jump and Paper Toss, though without being a ‘clone’ of any of these. It’s available for free, currently monetized with AdMob ads. The game is very simple but I’m very pleased with it.

Give it a go – download for iOS or Android. Any positive reviews/ratings are of course much appreciated!