Any clue how an independent game developer can build the same app for multiple platforms without wasting a lot of time?
Being a sole developer I find it quite difficult to develop for multiple platforms at the same time unless there's a framework that allows me to do so. Are the people behind the games in the bundle using a sort of "multiplatform-framework" ?
Write your code in C++. Use OpenGL 1.x for graphics. This will allow you to easily target pretty much every platform in existence now. People used to use SDL as a general wrapper for OS specific stuff like setting up your window context and getting UI events, though I'm not sure if it's still in vogue now.
That said, writing games is one of the hardest types of software engineering task, in my experience. On top of that, all but the best games tend to have a very short lifespan compared to other kinds of software.
You've really got to love making games to stick around in the field long enough to get good.
I guess Apportable is building a framework to manually port iOS to Android.
"Apportable is a venture-backed team of six engineers, looking for a few more. We're solving some ridiculously hard problems porting iOS to Android. Our software is already being used by some of the world's largest and best game developers"
I don't know about proprietary games, but Free Software games commonly make use of very good libraries and APIs, almost all being cross-platform. SDL, Qt, and OpenGL come to mind. Also LUA as embedded language for scripting, and highlevel libraries for various programming languages such as PyGame.
You can use OpenGL & Qt for that matter. You can write proprietary software if you purchase a Qt license.
In fact, programming with Qt is usually write once, compile for: Windows, OSX, Linux, Android. Most of the time, you will not need to adjust a single line of code for it to work. Given that you keep the other platforms in mind while designing your e.g. UI.
You can write proprietary software if you purchase a Qt license
As of at least a year or two ago Qt as been LGPLv2 and thus you can write proprietary software with the free Qt license as well. The only thing you can't do (without releasing your code) is make changes to Qt itself.
Unreleased builds of Unity compile to Native Client, and the Unity 3.5 beta can compile to Flash. I saw some reference to an unfinished internal build that made Linux binaries a while back, but that's probably a ways out. Compiling to Flash is probably your best bet right now.
Being a sole developer I find it quite difficult to develop for multiple platforms at the same time unless there's a framework that allows me to do so. Are the people behind the games in the bundle using a sort of "multiplatform-framework" ?