This question might be too broad, but how would you compare the infrastructure, English level, technical talent, etc. of Rwanda with other African nations?
I think it also depends on the type of operations you're looking to hire. I've found that people with stronger skill sets (for example, engineers), are very difficult to hire for swing or overnight shifts, even if salaries are double or triple the daytime shift.
(I run 24/7 operations in Vietnam, I'd love to talk shop.)
A cross-platform game engine sounds awesome. But I wonder what kind of game can truly be write-once, run-everywhere, and considered "fun" on all platforms.
A few major challenges:
- Designing a game that is fun and intuitive to play with a wide variety of input controllers (touch, mouse, keyboard, joystick).
- Handling the entire spectrum of screen resolutions, from older iPhones to high-end desktop computers. The game would also probably need to work in both portrait and landscape modes.
- The QA effort alone could be huge. Testing on quirky desktop browsers or buggy Android devices alone could be a dealbreaker.
- I'd argue that the time spent trying to figure out a game design or technical workaround for a particular platform would be better spent focusing on one platform and making the game more fun. In my experience, trying to make a fun game involves a lot of trial and error and iteration, and I personally don't think I could do it if I also had to keep in mind multiple distinct target platforms.
I can envision a couple one-button games like Angry Birds or Tiny Wings possibly having a chance, but even in those cases, I'd argue it'd be better to nail one platform first and then incrementally add other platforms instead of spreading oneself too thin.
The pressure to censor content often comes from advertisers. A lot of advertisers don't want their ads showing up next to photos with even minimally offensive content.
(This doesn't explain everything for Google, but I'm sure it was a factor.)
At its core, our networking layer uses long-polling, but we added several modifications to attempt to keep the requests alive. We also drastically changed the timeout values based on testing directly on the mobile devices.
We found that vanilla long-polling works sometimes on iPhone and some Android phones. But it often introduces huge latencies, and it often just fails for no apparent reason on some Android devices.
I'd like to add that, in practice, socket.io doesn't work well for mobile HTML5 multiplayer games. We found that long-polling requests tend to get dropped without informing the mobile client.
Our solution so far has been to roll our own mobile networking layer, with redundancies and timeouts especially tuned for mobile.
I've been working in the crowdsourcing field for several years now (our workers are from Vietnam), and can understand that the profit margins can be very thin for some of the more basic tasks.
Drop me a line if you're interested in branching out to Vietnam.
Reading through the link, I believe it does a combination of skin tone detection and human body pattern matching. Typically, this solution can detect a fully nude human pretty well, but fails on something like a close-up/partial shot of a penis.
I've worked with a number of companies that have tried an automated solution (including teams with PhDs in Computer Vision), but it's just not there yet. I'm sure within the next 5 years someone will figure it out, though.
I've been a developer for iPhone/Android for a couple years now. Making livable money on iPhone, just barely breaking even, if not losing money, on Android.
- Your best shot at Android is to make an app that doesn't push the hardware. We built a high-end game, but we couldn't afford to keep supporting the latest devices. In fact, our game crashes hard on the Xoom/Gingerbread, but it's not making enough money to justify a fix. Fragmentation is a huge problem on Android, so for indie devs, staying low-end is the only real alternative.
- Our games have been featured by both Apple and Android, and been in both top selling lists. Our Apple revenue was easily 50x our Android revenue.
- I think you'll have better luck from a free, ad-supported app instead of a paid app on Android.
- If you want to make livable money, then your options are: (1) get as iOS app featured by Apple, or in the top 200 apps for a long time, or (2) create a stable of smaller apps that work well on all iOS/Android and don't need to be ported/tested on each individual device.
- Starting from different points in the piece also provides a good subtle variation.
- Playing the piece at different octaves.