Interview with Marmalade

Marmalade company told about itself, its plans for the future, the gaming market and competitors. 

The questions were answered by Tim Closs, CTO Marmalade.

Imagine a mobile game developer choosing an engine for his future game. What would you tell him about Marmalade?The advantages of Marmalade are as follows:

• Compile to C++ directly for CPU, no virtual machines.
• Direct access to OpenGL ES 2.0 is possible
• Open and standards-based. Use standard C++ libraries. Implement any existing C/C++ code 
• Flexible. Not a monolithic engine, but a multi-level abstraction from the platform, in which you can include any third-party component of your choice.

Tell us a little about the history of the company? Where and how did it all begin? Why did you decide to take up mobile game engines?Marmalade was registered under the name Idealworks3D in 1998.

From the very beginning, we positioned ourselves as a computer graphics company. We licensed the technology to Intel, Autodesk and Nokia, and in 2003 decided to focus on mobile devices. This happened thanks to our close relationship with Nokia and their ambitions. We were the first company to create a high-performance mobile game engine that supports Symbian, Brew and Windows Mobile.  

It is clear that the platform market has changed markedly since then, but the key principles of our technology are still the same: high performance, developer orientation and support for all significant platforms.

Which companies do you consider your competitors?We compete with other well–known engines, with free alternatives like Cocos2d, as well as the worldview that the only way to achieve high performance is to use native SDKs for the platform. Marmalade proves that you can use the full power of C++ on different platforms.

What trends would you note in the mobile games industry? What to expect this year?The Freemium model is, of course, a revolution that will continue to spread.

It is also becoming the norm to complicate content and increase the cost of production. For the consumer, this is a plus. It is extremely fascinating to watch the increasing number of Android gaming platforms outside of mobile (I’m talking about TV and pocket consoles). I think that developers of high-quality mobile content will earn money on one of these platforms by the end of the year.

Some developers say that Marmalade has problems with the implementation of third-party libraries. It is quite difficult to integrate various advertising and marketing SDKs and other services like Game Center into it. When does Marmalade plan to solve these problems?Marmalade is an open platform, so developers can use the third–party service they want.

But a wide range of services can be confusing, especially small studios. In our next big SDK, we plan to include the SDK of the best services so that developers can work with Marmalade “right out of the box”. 

Will there be a NUI editor in Marmalade?We plan to support Android XML for UI.

So third-party tools that support the Android format will work with Marmalade. This is our plan for the end of 2013. 

Are you going to support STL libraries?Marmalade already supports STL and about 95% of standard C/C++ libraries.

Will the final release of Remote Control take place?Remote Control is the ability to use a smartphone or tablet via Wi–fi to control a game running in Marmalade Simulator.

It is listed in beta only because it is not available on Mac. It works great on Windows. To be honest, the process of installing devices is now quite fast, and Remote Control is often not required. 

What features do you plan to introduce in the future?We have just announced a new version of our SDK – Marmalade Juice.

This is the world’s first cross-platform SDK for Objective-C, which eliminates the need for “rough” porting of such projects.