Sega at GDC 2013

March 2013 – At GDC 2013 in San Francisco, we visited with Three Ring Studios, which has been producing games for Sega since 2001. In 2003, they launched their premier game Puzzle Pirates. This game is an MMO RPG that is playable on PC/Mac and Linux systems. The game has recently been ported to iOS and Android for the tablet marketplace.

The Free To Play (FTP) game is based on the user being to create custom avatars that then take roles in a pirate adventure with mini-games and competitions to earn skill points and experience. These mini-games can be by-passed with the use of in-game currency to accelerate game play.

The multi-platform game was design as a Java client-server architecture game. This connection is built into the core of the game operation and Javva code is then recompiled into iOS, Androind and into HTML5 code using the licensing free Play N engine. This open source product allows for the development of native apps on these mobile devices. For iOS, the java is cross-compiled to C#, and the game is designed to now use only a Mono-Touch interface on the tablets so the game play is the same as using a mouse on the laptop/desktop platforms.

As the game is designed for a common experience that is independent of the platform, the game does not encounter and performance issues being on a tablet rather a traditional device with an external graphics card that has an embedded physics engine. The architecture of the games is that they don’t need and in-game power management. The game is memory intense, not CPU intense, so power optimization options are limited. As the characters are built using standard 2D characters, the power that would allocated to the 3 dimensional shaders is not required.

The studio is in the process of determining if the game will be released on the kindle HD platform in the near future, or just stay with iOS and standard Android 7” and 10” tablet devices.