Could you introduce "Lonely Cat Games", when it was created, how many people work there?

LCG was created 3.5 years ago, as a PC-games development company. Since mid of last year, it is slowly transforming into mobile development, to grab new lands in this promising young business.

Your website does not mention mobile development nor any of your Symbian based application... Is it an hidden part of your work ?

Our web site is just being redesigned to mention this our activity. So far it is hidden, as we test waters in the area, now when we have several products out, we're going to create dedicated web site.

Do you have plan to expand this activity ?

We have various plans, and are in discussion with few partners on expanding of our activities. Currently our main activity is Symbian development, but we feel that cross-platform is the real challenge, so we try to get to PocketPC, linux, etc.

Why did you chose to develop on Symbian platform ? Would have not been easier to try to develop for Windows CE platform since your background looks to be in PC game ?

We started the research of mobile market last year, and first we started with Java, where we made few simple games. Since we had Symbian mobile for testing the Java games, it quite fast attracted as by much greater performance and well-known C++. Those times we didn't know anything about WinCE, but now we've already became familiar with PocketPC, and plat to port to this platform soon.

How difficult was it to move to this new environment ? What were your biggest challenge ?

Getting familiar with Symbian took some time, I remember weeks of reading documentation, making first steps, testing, debugging... As one of first projects, we decided to port Quake1 to Series60 phone, which was a big challenge, and it was successful - we have 5-level demo playing at ~11 fps. Unfortunately we do not spread the conversion due to license restrictions of Quake data.

Which IDE / SDK are you working with ? Are you using other tools ?

All our programming work is done in Microsoft Visual C++ 6. At very beginning, we got rid of mmp projects, Perl scripts, and all this nonsense, and compile only in MSVC (with help of few .bat files). For ARM builds, we use gcc, but also compile in MSVC using custom-build step. Regarding SDKs, we've installed four: Symbian 6.1 for Series60, Siemens version (using it's emulator only), SonyEricsson version (for UIQ builds) and Symbian 7.0 (has better documentation). Other important tools are: Visual SourceSafe and Photoshop.

Are you testing your game on the WINS emulator or are you doing most of the stuff on target ?

Majority of tests are done in emulator, due to faster development cycle. Periodically software is tested on real hardware, but only to find out if it's working as expected. Currently we're even primarily developing the core application directly on Win32 platform (creating small mobile-like window), and have Symbian only as one of target platforms - this produces fastest development, because the emulator takes ages to start up, and it costs a lot of time when app has to be tested.

What is missing in Symbian OS from your point of view ?

Symbian OS is young, and it does have its problems. Of course, it is working and living system, and many successful devices are built on it, but the confort of development for it is far below development for Windows platform. What is missing most is quality documentation. Provided docs do not cover some important topics (which are then discussed on development forums only), also hyperlinks do not work. And very missing is functional debugger - I've tried to run gdb, but unsuccessfully.

What is missing in phone hardware to make them real gaming device ?

I think it's bigger screen (which probably is not going to change), and also hardware acceleration for nicer 3D graphics - here I think mobiles will catch up very soon.

How do you see the future of mobile devices (and especially Symbian devices) as gaming platform ?

Symbian just started debut as gaming platform, but there're strong opponents around - GBA, coming PSP. I suppose the market will force mobile manufacturers to constantly come with enhanced versions of devices. I think N-Gage is just beginning of this trend, probably soon we'll see devices with smooth antialiased 3D graphics and more quality sound. Hard to predict if Symbian or other OS will be used.

What will be your next mobile game ?

We've made initial tests regarding 3D on Series60 platform, and consider making a 3D game. But development of 3D game requires more resources (time, money, people), so probably our next game will still be 2D. Anyway currently we're making a line of non-game applications, since it seems there's more demand for apps than for games on Symbian at present.

If there was a technical issue you really would like to have an answer right now, what would it be ?

Biggest nightmare are present - why is CMdaAudioOutputStream not playing sound when bluetooth headset is plugged to the phone. Since we don't have BT headset, I'd love to know the answer.

And finally : What is your phone ?

A Nokia 3650.

Related Links

  Lonely Cat Games Homepage
  NewLC Mau Mau review
  Buy Mau Mau for Series 60