My friend wrote an amazing puzzle game, but it only runs on Mac. I asked him permission to re-write the game for Windows and he agreed. The (cropped and trimmed) screenshot should be informative. The user interacts by clicking on squares (placing blocks), when s/he presses "run" the simulation runs (ball flies around doing stuff). I have written a game before: Gravity Wars and am somewhat comfortable with C++. I programmed Gravity Wars with Visual C++ 2008 (starting with awful code that makes drawn things disappear when user minimizes the window). My question: Will using Visual C++ 2008 make things more problematic than using something else? I have glanced at the "Make a Tetris clone in an hour -GameDev.net" and I guess I just need to populate my game with sprites that behave in Tetris-like ways? Many thanks ahead of time :)

From the sounds of it you could probably make a port using a simple tool such as Game Maker. If you're really looking for the easiest way to port the game then you're not going to beat that or similar packages.

You could also make it in Flash or Flex (depending on your experience and what package(s) you have available to you (I noticed you had a Flash version of your Gravity Wars game). The Flash player should be more than capable of running such a puzzle game and it'd work just about everywhere including many mobile devices. If your friend was interested this is quite possibly also the best way to make some money off the game (via sponsorship or options such as MochiAds, Kongregate, etc.).

If you don't have access to those or don't want to use one there are plenty of programming languages that would make the task simpler than C++; C# or Python are quite popular these days. The downside to this option would be having to learn a new language and development tools if you don't already know a language other than C++, although this can be quite a quick process for an experienced programmer.


Lastly, there's nothing wrong with C++ as a choice of language, and Visual C++ is pretty much the best IDE out there to be using if you do. If you've already got some experience programming in C++ then this may well even be potentially faster/easier than some other options for you. I'd suggest using a relatively simple graphics API such as SFML or SDL if you're going to be programming in C++, or once again, whatever you used for your previous game should probably work fine.


To summarise, I'd probably recommend targetting the Flash Player by using either Flash/ActionScript or programming in Flex.

Hope that helps. [smile]

Thank you jbadams and jackofalllanterns!

I'm somewhat reluctant to learning a new language - and I think I've gotten quite used to C++ in my few weeks of agony over Gravity Wars :P

I've tried "Game Maker" (as well as "Game Factory 2" that was used to make Knytt Stories) - but everything is counter-intuitive and requires learning how to deal with it. Seems like if I use Visual C++ I'll just have to learn how to load bitmaps as sprites (with transparency); turn my theoretical understanding of OOP into the right syntax; and learn a few things here and there about minor details.

I am staying away from Flash for now - but I will think about it hard before I start coding.

Thank you for your responses.

I welcome any other comments others have :)