ABYSS® Mobile Games Engine

The promise of mobile is tremendous. Over five thousand million people own a mobile telephone and thus also a potential handheld game console. By the end of 2010, with a solid 140 million devices on the market, the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad family alone will be as widespread as the Sony Playstation 2, the most successful game console of all time.
But unlike game consoles, which all have largely similar technical performance characteristics in the current generation, the differences in mobile phones is enormous. Just the number of mobile operating systems that must be supported represents a huge challenge for developers. In addition, even various models within a mobile phone ‘family’ have their special characteristics when it comes to screen resolution, computing power, memory, video memory, sound capabilities, and input options.

Made for mobile

Even with the very first games we started to develop in 2004, it was clear to us that we needed a powerful game engine that makes possible demanding 3D graphics with fluid gameplay for a wide variety of genres, even on mobile phones with extremely limited technical abilities. At the same time, it needed to be able to support as many operating systems as possible as well as be able to grow steadily with tremendous speed of innovation in the mobile industry. Of course, you couldn’t buy technology like that off the shelf. However, at the time, we were one of the very first studios in the world to have made 3D mobile a priority.

Development never ends

So we quickly developed our own mobile game engine and systematically designed it to meet the demands of the mobile games market. We named our game engine ABYSS® for good reason, because even then it could be seen that the development would never end, and we would always have to move forward into new areas. With nine supported operating systems, the result of six years of constant development is ABYSS® 3.0, as far as we know, the most flexible game engine on the market. It is also one of the most powerful. ABYSS® 3.0 uses extremely little memory and is nevertheless designed for maximum speed and even scales to the PC with the latest features, such as Vertex and Pixel Shader under OpenGL, without difficulty.

Proven millions of times over and tested by the industry

Over 35 million installed copies of our games run with ABYSS® on the iPhone, Symbian smartphones from Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung, as well as various models with the Android operating system. In addition, there are countless millions of mobile phones on which our Java games leave gamers all over the world with aching thumbs. However, ABYSS® successfully passed the toughest test with its worldwide pre-installation on mobile phoned from Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Because there, it is not just a matter of speed, but also minimum power use in suspend mode and maximum robustness in operation.