Given the range of hardware on which seniors might play games – and the corresponding software platforms those use, what tools should we use to explore this space?
Cross-platform Dev: Flutter for Now
I’ve been using Flutter for a couple of years now and, while it’s not without issues, it does seem to be a pretty good fit for this space. I’m conscious that, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail – but, at least for now, Flutter delivers on these fronts:
- lets me run apps on my phone from same codebase as my Dad runs on his touch-screen laptop in his favorite browser.
- easy to build and tweak multiple variants of the user interface.
Push Messaging: WhatsApp for starters
Some games – including my ‘proof of concept’ one, Scrabble – can run for many hours or days. Letting the other player know when it’s their turn is important. I’d hoped to start with WhatsApp – as that’s how my Dad prefers to message me – and it’s less hassle to set up than iOS and Android push notifications.
Recording voice messages for each other avoids him having to try and read or dictate text – which can lead to some interesting messages. Alexa, Siri and Google sometimes struggle with the Ulster accent and I sometimes have to say the words in my head with the accent reapplied to figure out the original meaning!
Unfortunately, the user experience with a Flutter app pushing messages into WhatsApp isn’t great on a phone. It’s better on a laptop where the WhatsApp window can be on screen at the same time as the game (typically running in a browser) – so once you’ve ‘linked’ your laptop to your phone’s WhatsApp account, it does work so holding on this for the moment.
Back-end: TBD
For proof-of-concept, I’m simply running my “Scrabble Server” on a Macbook with Dynamic DNS and a tunnel through my router on my home network. This is obviously not going to scale!
Previous experience with Google Cloud Services tells me that I could use Cloud Firestore and messaging – but that feels like overkill at present. Backendless and similar would also do but, again, are probably overkill.
