I’m designing QubeKwest to be a PC game first and foremost. My chosen language is Java, a language I’ve been using and loving (except for a couple small issues dealing with unsigned numbers) since 1.0.3. Thanks to Java, it should run equally well under Windows, Linux or Mac, but that doesn’t mean it won’t someday make its way onto Android or iPhone. I’m not yet sure how much horsepower will be needed to run the game or the server, but I’m hoping to keep it as reasonable as possible.
My development machine is an overly powerful high-end gaming computer, and frankly that makes it a terrible target platform. Very few people have computers that have tons of RAM, dual video cards, or eight available CPU cores. In other words, if I wrote it to run well on my development machine I’d price myself out of the market. To that end, I’ve chosen the new Raspberry Pi 2 as the target platform for both the server and the game itself. If I do it correctly, it should be able to run both the server and the game on a single Raspberry Pi 2, but we’ll see.
I’m one of those people that was following Raspberry Pi well before it was a real computer that you could actually buy. I pre-ordered my first Raspberry Pi when they thought they might eventually be able to sell 10,000 of them and when me and everyone else that wanted one took down servers all over the place trying to get our pre-orders in before they ran out. As it turns out, they ran out in seconds and we all had to wait months before we could have one, but that’s just part of the amazing story that is Raspberry Pi. Now they’ve sold over 5 million of them and are showing no signs of slowing down.
I personally own six Raspberry Pi computers. As mentioned before I own an original Raspberry Pi Model B (from when it had 256MB of RAM), I also have the improved Model B (where they bumped it to 512MB of RAM), I’ve recently acquired a Model B+ (where they added 2 more USB ports, switched to microSD cards, and removed some of the output connectors almost no one used) and three Raspberry Pi 2’s (which are similar to the B+ but with 1024MB of RAM and a vastly more powerful CPU). This cluster of little computers is my test bed for making sure my game doesn’t require more power than it should.