

Why We Aren’t Developing For Ouya - unstoppableted
http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/why-we-are-leaving-ouya/

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moron4hire
This bothers me. I'm not above some criticism for Ouya[1], but let's at least
keep it in realistic realms and in ways that can be used to improve the
product. By the end of this, not only was I not convinced it was a failing of
Ouya, even if I were, there was no indication of what Ouya could do better to
fix it.

They assumed you'd use the controller to move a pointer around on the screen,
instead of highlighting different buttons. Have they not played console games?
I can think of only a handful of console games that have a free-form pointer,
and it's only for the gameplay (the point-and-click adventure game and the
ill-informed PC strategy game to console port): the menus outside of gameplay
are still direction-driven.

Direction-driven, focus-based menus are very easy to build. You could go the
very easy way with a state machine, or you could even hack your way through it
with a bunch of counters and switch statements. To me, it actually fits easier
into the framerate conscious style of programming for games much, much easier
than a point-and-click interface, as you don't have to do any hit checking.
Not that hit checking itself is very hard, either.

Regardless, the menu system should be abstracted enough from the game code
that it wouldn't be an issue to rip it out completely and build a new one from
scratch. My impression is that this is the real issue. It's not that
direction-based menus are difficult to make, it's that it's difficult to make
any sort of changes to the type of spaghetti code that game developers and
mobile developers and small startup developers (God help us when they come in
the same package) write when they naively assume they "don't have time" to
write good code. This isn't limited to these fields, but these particular
types of people tend to be the least matured into their programming.

But yeah, be the workman who blames his tools. It's Ouya's fault that you
can't write the bare simplest menu style in the field of gaming.

[1] The wifi might be slow (I don't know if I have an interference problem
yet) and some of the controller buttons get snagged on the inside edge of the
faceplate if I press them too hard. The wifi might not be their fault and I
can fix the faceplate on my own. Brand new hardware from a brand new company
is going to have some rough edges (literally, in this case).

