What platform should I choose for my game?

After we came up with our initial game concept, we had to determine which platform we would target for our initial launch. Should we develop for the iPhone, iPad, Android, PC, Mac, Web, Facebook, etc.? After doing a LOT of reading on the subject, we decided to develop for the iPad, then create versions for the iPhone, PC/Mac and Android. We may consider other platforms, but that was our initial plan.

We chose the iPad because we really wanted to start with Apple. We selected iPad over iPhone for the initial launch because the larger screen of the iPad could enable us to create a richer experience with our game for players than with the smaller screen of the iPhone. We read that if you are planning to develop for both iPad and iPhone platforms, it is smarter to start with the iPad since it is easier to remove elements from your graphics when you move to a smaller screen than it is to add more elements to your graphics if you increase the size of your screen. Having followed this advice, we feel that this was sound advice and are happy to have followed it. If you are designing for both platforms, do keep in mind the difference in proportion of the screens and create a plan for how you will approach the switch between the two. There are many ways you can approach this switch. For our initial game, we chose to create two separate applications rather than one universal application. The main reason was the method we chose for the switch between platforms would have resulted in a dramatic increase in file size if we made it a universal app and we really wanted to try to minimize that as much as possible.