Papaya Mobile is looking to charge forward when it comes to Android gaming as the company has shown some pretty good support for the platform thus far. However, the company is looking to entice more developers to make games for Android by releasing a new game engine that makes it easier for devs to create games.
If you’re unfamiliar with Papaya Mobile, it’s a “free, OpenGL run-time script engine that creates games which can easily hook into Papaya’s mobile social platform.”
Papaya already has 4 million users and is hoping to be the name in Android games, and the new game engine for developers, which works with the current Android APIs, should help the company towards that goal.
By leveraging the game engine, developers can work around the existing Android APIs, which are harder to learn for some non-Java developers, and build high-performance games in a scripting language similar to Python or Flash. Papaya said developers can build games in as little as a week using the engine and can reduce the time it takes to complete many repetitive tasks involved in programming by up to 50 percent.
A fifty percent reduction in completion time is huge! Developers looking to create games for Android may want to give this a shot, as it sounds like it might be the way to go, especially if they have way more game ideas than they can develop given such limited time.
Gaming on Android is three steps behind the iPhone as Apple’s smartphone has already been viewed as a decent alternative to dedicated hand-held gaming systems. Every little bit helps Android, and it looks like Papaya Mobile’s strategy here will be mutually beneficial for both the platform and the company. And hell, it should be great for developers, too. After all, Papaya has done its part in the past with helping developers get noticed, so this next step seems to be the logical one.
[Via: GigaOM]