Angry Birds may be the go-to smartphone game for people who like knocking things down, but what if building stuff up is more your cup of tea? Actually, there still is plenty of tearing things down… also making roller coasters and baking cake. Fans of the award-winning indie game Minecraft will soon be able to take their blocky worlds with them on the go, as Mojang, the company founded to further development of the game, has revealed that ports are in the works for both iOS and Android devices.

Maybe more so than any other recent game, Minecraft generates a love-it-or-hate-it reaction in those who have played it. Some gamers respond to the lack of objectives and free-form gameplay with praise for the creative options it offers, while others quickly get frustrated by a sense of having nothing to do, and no directions to guide them.

After considering all its options of how to get Minecraft onto smartphones, Mojang elected to bring a mobile app developer on-board its staff and oversee the ports as an internal project. As the game itself is written in Java, porting may seem like a straightforward task, but the deceptively simple game can be a bit of a memory hog, readily gobbling a gigabyte or more of available system resources. Part of the challenge of porting it to smartphones will likely be finding a way to decrease memory demands without compromising the vast, wide-open spaces and intricate cavern systems the game generates.

There’s no set release date this early on in the porting process, short of a target for sometime this year. As Minecraft only just went into beta, it’s far from a finished project, and could still be in development by the time the smartphone versions arrive. They’ll get some of the full version’s features, but there’s a chance that not everything from the PC edition will make its way to the mobile version. Just what will and won’t make the cut hasn’t been revealed yet.

Source: Kotaku

Via: Mobiputing