Talking with Manikantan Krishnamurthy, developer of Deep Days: Flash Lite game for Series 40 devices

An article by Nokia Devs    2 Comments

Today Nokia Devs talks with Manikantan Krishnamurthy, a mobile developer from Singapore, about his development experience on Nokia platforms. Manikantan has recently published a Flash Lite game for Series 40 devices, Deep Days, and other applications realized with the Ovi App Wizard.

ND: Welcome Manikantan, please tell us a bit about yourself.

I am Manikantan, a student of NTU, Singapore studying Masters in Digital Media Technology and I posses a computer engineering background from under-graduation. My interests lean towards developing games and Web 2.0 apps for mobile devices. I primarily have used Flash Lite for development over the past two and half years. Sometimes, I also indulge in programming using PyS60 and J2ME, and lately Qt. I am also part of Adobe Flash communities in India (a.k.a. IndiMaD). I also have published a broad range of applications and games at the Ovi Store under the publisher name Chompgames. I am a Forum Nokia Champion since 2009 and also a Forum Nokia Wiki moderator. I blog at flashactions.com and croozeus.com and active on twitter @manikantan_k.

ND: Which platforms and technologies do you use for mobile development on Nokia devices?

As far as Flash development goes, Adobe Creative Suite is the only thing I use. Adobe toolkit comes with an emulator program called Device Central with which all Flash content can be emulated on a plethora of phones. I like the Nokia Qt SDK that was released few months back. I faced problems installing the Symbian S60 SDKs on my Vista. But Qt for Nokia has solved those problems for me. I also sometimes use Eclipse and ERIC IDE for PyS60.

ND: When have you started working on Nokia devices, and what has changed since then?

My first app on mobile phones was in 2006, when I was not aware of Forum Nokia. My only support was Adobe Documentation. Over the years, there has been constant innovation and many transformations in various aspects. Devices have grown smarter with multiple sensors, UI has undergone a complete revamp. Mobile web is exploding and I have seen the mobile developer community grow multi-fold. Mobile development is starting to become the key skill that companies are hiring.

ND: Have you used Ovi App Wizard? If yes, what’s your opinion and how would you improve it?

Yes, Ovi App Wizard is an excellent tool that helped me build three applications, King Khan, Bollywoodie and Wallet Watch in practically no time. Though the tool doesn’t offer much UI customization, it promises a clean UI and has supports feeds from Twitter, Flickr and mechanisms like RSS and ATOM feeds.

I think, with mobile web exploding and many people enjoying internet from their handsets, these tools with quick time-to-market are handy. Some UI customization is an improvement I would like to witness.

ND: You have recently published a Flash Lite game for S40: Deep Days. Can you describe how you had the original idea, and the main hurdles you’ve found during development (and how you solved them)?

Deep Days has a funny starting, quite similar to Doc. Brown’s idea of time travel in Back to the Future movie. It was a sudden vision that came to my mind on a Saturday night at 2 am. And I was off to my machine to code it immediately. Within a few hours, I had written the core logic and mechanics of the game.

Being a programmer, I am not good at designing game assets. After some time, Wrecker Tike was generous to do the design and skinning of the game and I finally launched it in Ovi as Deep Days. I must say, being targeted at the lower S40 audience, it has been doing phenomenally well in the Ovi store.

ND: As a developer and publisher, which was the overall impression about the Ovi Store itself?

I am happy with how Ovi Store has been evolving in the recent months and Nokia users are beginning to enjoy a wider range of applications. However, not many indie developer studios have seen cash flow. I would also like to see featuring of localized applications in the Ovi main menu just like recommendations, and better costing abilities in for developers. For example, iAd from Apple is a wonderful initiative for developers creating free content. I would like to see more protection for these indie developers from Ovi and in totality a richer mobile ecosystem.

ND: How Flash Lite did help you to create your apps, and which limits did you find in using it?

Flash Lite is the rapid prototype creator’s dream tool. I think it is the best and quickest way to create games and rich media content. However putting it in a mobile context from Flash is a bit hard. For example, getting access to native file system or the sensors can sometimes cause erratic behavior on some Nokia phones.

So, if I had to harness these resources, I wouldn’t take Flash Lite, as I did in my master’s dissertation, where I control a vehicle on the PC using the sensors on my phone.I used PyS60 in this project and it proved to be very reliable.

ND: Which are the main resources and libraries/frameworks (if any) that you use for Flash Lite development?

Many game development or physics engines in Flash are available today only in AS3, which is still not supported in Nokia handsets. So I generally don’t use third party libraries. I think the Adobe Help and Documentation is the best resource for Actionscript developers. I sometimes use UI Frameworks like Shuriken in app, and sometimes use the Forum Nokia UI components.

ND: Is there something in Nokia technologies that you think it’s missing, and you would like to see in the near future?

After seeing iPhone, Android and Maemo phones, I am beginning to feel the Symbian phones’ UI is a bit outdated. I hoped to see a complete revamp in Symbian^3, but Symbian^3 looks quite similar to the current S60 phones in the market. I hope to see them in Symbian^4 devices. I also feel that there are too many programming languages within Symbian phones like java, Flash Lite, Python, Symbian C++ and now Qt apart from WRT. I hope this streamlines into fewer languages and more libraries in them rather than seeing the same platform services in different languages.

ND: Something else you’d like to tell to Nokia developers?

I have enjoyed my way in developing for Nokia handsets. I think it’s the right time to develop for these handheld computers today and encourage others to do so.