Foomer wrote:

I just got a cell phone for the first time ever (bye bye stone age!), and amongst other things I've fiddled a little bit with some of the games that the phone came with. While fiddling with the phone games, I was thinking to myself that my Gauntlet game would make a cool cell-phone game, since it basically works with just the arrow keys anyway.

However, at the moment I don't even have a clue how to get games onto the cell phone, let alone how to design them for it. I'm wondering if there's anyone here who's remotely familiar with this and could point me in the right direction to get more information on it?

I looked into this a while back. Things may have changed, but most cell phone games to my knowledge run on Java and use specialized libraries for drawing and such. The problem is, this varies by phone family and capabilities, and the libraries and info needed to create said games tend to be proprietary. Most cell phones have their technology locked up tight so the companies can totally control content. Heck, the only way I ever got my own pics and ringtones onto my phone (which is far outmoded now) was to purchase a cable from Radio Shack and use bitpim (a freeware program) to link it up.

The iPhone is an exception to some of the above. If you're willing to unlock your phone so third-party apps will run (because Apple's restriction against that is pigheaded), a number of people have already developered homebrew apps for it. It seems that programming for the iPhone is far easier because it's more like a regular system or at least more like a portable game system in its design. I haven't looked into iPhone development myself, inasmuch as I don't have one, but I've seen some of the apps in passing.

Lummox JR

Google should be releasing it's new brand of cell phones sometime this year that employ it's Android SDK which allows developers to make apps for their cell phones. It uses java and there is also a nifty little competition--not sure if that's still going or not.