It’s been three years since the initial release of Elevator CEO on the App Store. It’s been downloaded thousands of times, reviewed at least 10 times, and made me hundreds of cents in revenue. So, how do I perpetuate that success? Expand it to another platform!
The framework powering Elevator CEO is called Cocos2D-iPhone. Once a game is deployed there’s little reason to update the engine powering it. It was written in Objective-C and can only run on Apple devices. To remedy that problem, I’ve been converting every line of code to C++. Using the Cocos2D-X engine, it’s been a remarkably smooth transition. The APIs are nearly identical with only minimal changes to make it cross-platform compatible. With only a few lines of platform-specific code, I can target iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux.
I’ve converted about 3000 lines of code which represents roughly 50% of the game. I started in August and have made steady progress. The main menu works, audio, fonts, and text translation load—all tested on my Moto-X Android.
For years I’ve wondered what it would be like to actually show people my game using my phone. I’ve been an Android phone user for years. I’ve had an iPod touch for testing, an iPad 2 for web surfing on the sofa, and an iPhone 6 (provided by my last job) for about 10 months. I look forward to adding a new platform, a familiar one, and exploring what it’s like to manage an app on the Google Play store.
