Thursday, April 12, 2012

Mobile game development....

and me.

I decided to use develop for the android market for many reasons.
1. Only a one time $25 dollar fee to sign up.
2. Android is growing very rapidly.
3. Almost real time feedback on apps or games that you release.
4. There seemed to be many suitable frameworks to build from.
5. Google Android is mostly open source
6. Starting in Java saves headaches.

I will go into more details on the above list in future blog posts but those were just a few of the reasons why I decided to develop for android.

Now that I knew what platform I would develop for the next step was to find a framework to use. After much research, trial error, quitting and starting over, I decided to use the LIBGDX framework. LIBGDX is an opensource framework developed by badlogic and nate sweet. You can find more information on the framework here, the blog here, and their forums here.

Now that I had my target platform, development framework, now all I needed was an amazing idea. After a lot of thinking I decided to take on the technically challenging Arkanoid. After a bit of cold feet, I got started actually writing semi functional mobile code about 5 or 6 months ago. My first Android Game Break!

I chose this seemingly simple game because the game mechanics are straight forward, the ball bounces off the walls, paddle, and destroys the blocks and the player gets some points. If the ball falls below the paddle, the player loses a life and if the player loses all their lives its game over.

With such simple game play mechanics one would think it should be easy to create such a game. Well for me, it took me about one and a half month to get the game. The game play is very fast and can be quite challenging, once you get the feel for the game it becomes a little easier to handle but it does take some time.

Even with such a great framework and a fairly easy to use programming language, It was still very technically challenging to get something to even show up on screen. Then actually implementing the above stated mechanics in code.

You can check out the game for yourself.
or 

to be continued....

2 comments:

  1. This is the essential thing that most of the android users are now using because of its easy platforms. What is really important is that you know how to use your platform in doing your mobile development so that is will be very easy for you to have good output of your work.

    Florida Game Developer | Miami Game developer

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