Decisions Decisions

I can honestly say that there’s so many things that I want to learn and start putting into practice but there just isn’t enough hours in the day.

Ultimately with games development I would like to be able to work with as many platforms as possible, and there are so many different ideas bursting forth that I want to start seeing come to some fruition, but at the moment I honestly don’t know where I want to start.

I think I’d be aiming for the iPhone(casual) and PC markets to begin with, with a potential to working on larger projects on consoles with the XBox 360 and PS3 in mind (potentially Wii/Wiiware too), but to start putting things together I’m still trying to get my head around both direction and engine. Should I keep tinkering on in 2D or rendering 3D animations as 2D sprites and carry on working with GameMaker, or should I start looking at porting 2D animations into Unity3D and working with that, or skip the whole 2D rendering of animated 3D models and start working in Unity3D, or even start looking at engines like ShiVa?

Ultimately I’d like to find something that I know can be used with little to no additional modification in order to start targetting platforms like the iPhone, but I also don’t like the idea of parting with a large amount of money in order to do so.

Yoyo’s recent work to convert GameMaker 7 & 8 games to iPhone/iPad/PSP/etc. is quite an interesting prospect and for some things that I’ve helped out with to date, it could be a serious contender for helping to release a commercial game, although at the same time, having seen some of the work done with Unity3D, and having previously had fun creating environments and characters to run around within the engine, it has been something I’ve enjoyed doing, however the cost of the iPhone and Android plugins do add quite a bit to the overall cost, especially when you have no confirmation as to whether your idea is going to sell or not. (not even going to contemplate Wii / PS3 / Xbox 360 until I KNOW that we’re onto a winner)….

Gaaaa, my head is spinning.

Of course, I could always try learning C# / C++, or just leave the coding side of it all to the programmers at Horizon Studios.