Thank you. We've worked over the
past 2.5 years to complete Warfare Incorporated. The core team is myself and
Darrin Massena. Over that period we had a number of part time artists, and
towards the end we had additional full timers working on code, art, mission
design, and play testing, and functional testing. I estimate somewhere between
10K and 15K man hours for v1.0. Darrin and I are primarily developers and have been writing software for over 20 years each.
There wasn't one person who
thought of the idea first. We had each considered RTS because we talked about
it together. However I specifically remember Darrin asking if I was interested
in committing to it. The idea from the beginning was to develop a PC quality
real-time strategy game from scratch for the PDA platform. We started early Q1
2001.
It's 100% effort. The effort led
to the programming techniques required to solve the problems encountered. Our
goal from the very beginning was to bring a PC gaming experience to the PDA
platform. We targeted our low end (devices like Palm IIIc, Clie t615c, Palm Vx
etc) and spent the time needed to make these devices perform well, which
benefitted all devices of higher capability. Palm offers a wide platform
challenge, from cpu speed to memory size, to screen size, audio capability,
etc. The PocketPC platform is more homogenous. Supporting the PocketPC platform
was fairly easy from a device capability viewpoint, however there were other
challenges like scaling art to work well on a 240x320 or 320x240 screen (in the
end we have 4 different art variants that ship with the game, depending on
color / grayscale and device resolution). . 
It's been very positive. We've
read quotes like "Warfare Incorporated brings a new level of gaming
experience to my PDA" which is music to our ears! 
We have a full blown mission
editor that we've created, which we used to author the current in-game
missions. We're tying up some loose ends on this and will be releasing to
the public shortly. We'll include one or two of the bundled missions as
examples. You'll be able to author the mission, save it as a .pdb, hotsync to
your device and play.
Yes, that was always our
intention. We aimed to leverage the best experience from of the various device
capabilities that exist, and we allocated the time to do that. We wanted
everyone to have a good experience on their PDA, whatever the type.
I don't have one favorite.
Favorite non-fiction books I've read: "Internetworking with TCP/IP" series by Douglas E.
Comer "6502 Assembly Language Programming" by Rodnay Zaks
Favorite fiction book: "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck
I find PDAs interesting to write
software for but honestly I don't carry a PDA around with me. I have a wide
array of devices that I "use" for testing, playing, developing, but
don't really use one for personal use. From my developers' perspective my
favorites are: the Palm IIIc because of its bright screen and long battery
life, Clie t615c because of its high-res screen and slow cpu (great for
performance benchmarking), Tungsten T because of its super fast hotsync time
and fast video ram access, Palm OS 5, and overall quality, iPaq 1910 PocketPC
for its small form factor, inexpensive price, great screen and great
performance. This is our tagline from the
marketing dept. (Handmark): "Heart-Pounding Real-Time Strategy in the Palm of your Hand!"
Thank you for the opportunity to
talk about Warfare Incorporated.