Is it possible to make a game for a console or handheld?

You can also develop for iOS (iPhone/iPad) if you have MacOSX and have registered as Apple Developer ($100/y).
Sony currently is releasing PlayStation Suite (it's still in beta) - it will be C# based framwork for PS Vita and Xperia Android phone games.

As for homebrew (meaning it won't run on unmodified consoles) - you can develop also for PSP and PS3.

I have made a couple simple android games that i like to show my friends but one problem always gets in the way and that is the controls. Some ideas I have dont always seem to work with the touch control scheme and the screen size. I was told that a tablet has more screen size to play with. In my search for a control idea I saw microsofts xna frame work and it looked awesome. I could make games for the xbox and or windows phone 7( I own an xbox but not the latter so I guess just xbox in this case). This looked amazing. I was wondering if there were any other hardware manufacturers that let you make indie games on their platform like microsoft does? I looked up for sony for example and i saw the playstation suit but the wiki article was old and it said it was outdated.

Not hardware, but software lets you make games for consoles + various devices. Yes, Microsoft makes the xbox and offers XNA for developing games, so in their case they make both.

The game engine I like is called Unity 3d, which is similar to XNA, except Unity comes with a basic package bundle (renderer, physics engine, asset manager, etc in a nice SDK). The only free version is for PC, Mac, and Web Browser game development. If you buy licenses you can publish your games to various devices including Nintendo Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, as well as iOS and android devices ( http://unity3d.com/unity/publishing/ ). I use the web browser version and it works amazingly well for web browser 3d games. There are some impressive mobile games that have been developed with it if you do a search.

Here's my crappy AI testing for the browser based game I was making with it as a total newb: [media][/media] I gave up when I couldn't get multiplayer working right.

Also it was impressively easy to make 3d worlds with Unity by importing heightmaps you make in photoshop. I made some by taking screenshots on google earth, painting them with solid grayscale colors and importing into Unity in around an hour. You can also terraform maps live and do neat stuff I haven't seen pursued, most people seem focused on voxels.

SDL was ported to PSP from what I read.
You could also check out the Super Mario World hacking community because some of them are thinking of putting their games on the SNES which could play on the WII.

About Android controls, yet making a games with good controls is hard. I expermented with many things and found out that only the touch screen should be supported. Some phones have not keyboard, trackball, etc. but all have a touchscreen. Anyways, your graphics need to be a fixed size like 320x480, for example. You would want your phone's hardware to prescale the graphics. To do that create graphics at resolution 320x480 and set the AndroidManifest.xml file like this:


<!-- Screen Configuration -->
<supports-screens android:resizeable="true" android:smallscreens="false" android:normalscreens="true" android:largescreens="true" android:anydensity="false">
<!-- Input Device Configuration -->
<uses-configuration android:reqtouchscreen="finger">
<uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.touchscreen" android:required="true">


Next, I suggest sticking with a basic touchscreen control pad. Simple is better. Here's one that I'm using:



Simple but usable. The bump map for the buttons is as follows:



This control configuration has worked for me so far but can only take one input at a time which is not bad but unfortunately many of the Android phones do not support multitouch. Gestures are also the way to go depending on the game but I haven't played with these yet.