One of the dedicated gaming talks at BlackBerry DevCon Europe 2012 was headlined by Anders Jeppsson, RIM's head of games.

Entitled 'Game Makers Dream: The BlackBerry native SDK for BlackBerry Tablet OS', it provided a high level overview of where the company is going.

"We've been working hard behind the scenes, asking questions like 'What sort of tooling should we be offering to game developers to make development and monetisation easier?' Jeppsson said.

"Developers want to focus on what adds end user value."

Firm foundations

Kicking into detail on the native SDK for PlayBook, Sean Paul Taylor, RIM's team lead for gaming R&D said, "We focus on open standards like POSIX, C++, Sockets, OpenGL ES 1.1/2. and OpenAL 1.1," adding, "We've really been pushing that," with respect to the audio standard.

RIM is has also ported a lot of open source engines to PlayBook, including Boost, Box2D, Bullet physics, Lua and cocos2d-x.

It's even working on gameplay, its own 3D game framework.

"We're trying to make it a non-RIM gaming framework for anyone to use - it's not really an engine," Taylor said of the technology, which is designed to highlight ground up cross-platform C++ development.

In the game

As part of the initiative, RIM's internal game group has been making small prototypes, including a simple spaceship game, a particle effect demo using a fire-eating dragon and a twin-stick shooter, which may become a fully fledged game.

"We call it creating an itch for developer to build on," Taylor explained, mixing up his metaphors somewhat by adding, "We're eating our own dog food, so we know we're provided the right tools."

You can find out more about making games for Blackberry at blackberry.com/gamedeveloper