Red Bull X-Fighters - Case Study
What's your role within Xendex?
I am Mario Wessely, Xendex’s Technical Director and R&D engineer. My experience in mobile development goes back to 2001. I was the lead programmer for 9 published titles on various platforms and our development/porting platform tinBrain.
How long have you been using Bedrock?
We have been using Bedrock since early 2008. We have our own in-house development system tinBrain which we use on J2ME titles, but were looking for a technology that would both let us convert legacy Java titles to the iPhone and other smartphones and that we could also use for new cross-platform development projects going forward.
Tell us about Red Bull X-Fighters.
The project was originally designed as a 3D title running under JSR-239, JSR-184 and Mascot Capsule and was initially developed before we were aware of Bedrock. As a high performance 3D title it would be a tough test to try the technology out with but we were very impressed when we took the code base and very quickly had the game up and running on the iPhone with few changes required. This let us spend our time adding cool features on the iPhone rather than spending our development budget simply getting the game working. The title has been a great success on the iPhone and we have also used Bedrock to take the game to the Sony PSP, Android, BREW and most recently Samsung bada.
Did you have any issues with integrating the technology?
No this was a very smooth process. We have our own handset profiles and resource handling so decided not to use the optional Bedrock libraries for this, but to keep with our own. We have fully integrated our existing development setup so that we invoke the Bedrock cross-compiler when required to generate native builds for all smartphones.
Why has Bedrock been so useful to your company?
Bedrock has let our developers focus on actually developing the game or application in question rather than worrying too much about platform specific issues, meaning developers have been productive on new platforms more quickly allowing us to concentrate on developing a better game experience. On top of this the efficiencies have meant that we have been able to target additional platforms far more cheaply than would otherwise be possible. We can hit more platforms, more cheaply and therefore earn more revenue.
