Previous post : Mac port of Wildlife Tycoon : Venture Africa [1]

Retail version
For the retail version we’ve worked with Mumbo Jumbo.
At first I was a little afraid of the bug reports Mumbo Jumbo submitted to us. I already worked on the port for 70+ hours and they annoy me with "bugs" like "Game window does not have a title"?!?
Turns out they were right and all the little fixes I add to macCarb were legitimate! Honestly it was a great chance to work with them, they are professionals and you can learn a lot about polishing by working on that kind of things.
Some examples of bugs I had to work on:
– Game cannot be quit by selecting "Quit" from Mac OS menu
– Game window is unmovable after switching from Fullscreen
– Window’s close button becomes broken
– Keyboard shortcut for ‘Hide’ does not function properly in Fullscreen
Hopefully TGE 1.4.2 will be available soon so I’ll not have to post all of this changes as a ressource. I sing praises every day to my other god (sorry Tom), Paul Scott.
The retail build took me 60 more hours of work.
Web version
In February we started working on the downloadable version of Wildlife Tycoon.
Andy have a deal with GarageGames for the web version so we needed to integrate the Ignition library to the game. Most of the work was for Andy so it was a nonstressful job for me… I only had to make sure that the game was working on Mac, correct a few things and prepare a correct DMG image.
Conclusions
– Remember that, for a casual game, half of your sells will come from the Mac build. It’s a critical investment for indies.
– If you’re shooting for a multiplatformes release, try to keep the engine code away from too specifics modifications.
From the day I started working on this port to the day we had the Gold version of WT for retail, 2/3 of my time was taken by the two heavy modifications of the code base.
Ask yourself if the changes you’re planing worth the time you’ll invest to port it to Mac. Or make sure that it will not be an issue…
– If you’re short in time or if you don’t want to overload yourself try to find a contractor for the Mac build. You’ll not need a Mac expert in early stage but try to find one before the Beta Testing of your game.
– Personally I invested too much time on this port : 150+ hours during 4 months. All my other projects stoped during this time so it was a bit hard for my development schedule. The good side of it is that I learn a lot of things and working with Andy is a superb experience.
I’ll certainly work on other ports in the future, even if it’s sometime a long-run investment, it’s a good practice and help me see the production of other projects.
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