During March for One Game A Month I made something less serious. It’s called Slashat: The Game and you can find more information about it here.
I’m pretty sure that I will try to make something in C++ with SDL and possibly OpenGL for April. Mainly because I would like to get learn more low-level programming. But I also can’t get over that Java feels wrong for making games. Wish me good luck – I guess it will be needed!
During February for One Game A Month I decided to play around with Box2D and learn how it works. The result is Geometri Destroyer. It’s mainly made for Android and can be downloaded from Google Play. Since I have had a lot to do in school and such I couldn’t put in a ton of time into the game, but I’m happy with the result.
Prior to the new year I signed up for One Game A Month. It’s essentially a year long game jam where you are tasked to create and submit a new game during each of the year’s months. There are no prizes, so you are only doing it for your own sake. My #1GAM profile can be found here:
For January I decided to create a 2D side-scrolling platformer where you jump on platforms as Nyan Cat. Today I finished it, submitted it to Google Play and it’s called Skuttande Nyan Cat. It can be found on the following URL:
I’m proud of the result and I had tons of fun developing it. 
It’s not that much content in it tho, but considering it was developed during about 2 weeks I think it’s fair.
Skuttande Nyan Cat is written in Java, and I’m using the game library LibGDX and the entity system framework Artemis. This is the first program I have finished with those libraries, and I must say that they are really good and fun to work with. I used AndEngine in a previous project, and that sucks hard in comparison. With LibGDX it’s also possible to run the same code base on the desktop and in some cases in the browser too, which is really cool. In fact I did most of the testing on my desktop, with the game running as a regular Java application.
If you haven’t already, sign up for 1GAM! It’s motivating and forces you to learn to finish projects. It will also give you a lot of coding experience and games in your portfolio.
Yesterday I downloaded Game Dev Story to my Android phone, and so far I have managed to play it for like 1 hour. I have to say that it’s a really fun and engaging game. The game is like an RPG where you start a game company, hire people and develope games that you later sell and make money off. The point is to make your company grow, level up your staff and so on. You really have to check it out if you own an Android phone.
Yesterday I got really tired of how slow my rooted Samsung Galaxy Spica I5700 was. Up until then it was so slow that I had to wait like 10 seconds before the SMS window would show up. It was rooted with LK2.08 and I had also installed SamdroidMod Kitchen. But yesterday I downloaded the latest “normal” firmware to Galaxy Spica and installed it with Odin. The installation went fine, without bricking my phone. And it is sooo fast now compared to LK2.08! It feels so fun to use it now. I can’t understand why the phone became so slow with my previous configuration. However, if you want to unroot your phone and/or update the firmware of your Galaxy Spica, here are some useful links:
I found and installed a really neat application to the Android SDK and pc. It’s called Sensor Simulator and is used to simulate the different sensors that can be found in Android phones, like the accelerometer, magnetic field sensor and the orientation sensor. I got this application working after that I managed to get the adb command in the terminal to work. Because it consists of two apps, one that you install on your virtual phone and one java app that you run on your computer. So it’s kinda useless if you aren’t able to install apps on your virtual phone from the computer. By the way, click on the image above to open it in a new window/tab to see it in the native resolution, in which you are actually able to read the text.
If you are interested, check out the links below.
Links:
At first, the commands android and adb didn’t work in my Ubuntu terminal. But what I did to get them to work was modifying the .bashrc file in my home folder. It’s hidden so I showed it with Ctrl + H. In the file i edited the PATH lines to this:
#AndroidDev PATH
export PATH=$PATH:/home/teraspes/android-sdk-linux_x86
export PATH=$PATH:/home/teraspes/android-sdk-linux_x86/platform-tools
export PATH=$PATH:/home/teraspes/android-sdk-linux_x86/tools
I can’t really recall what they were from the start, and I don’t know if all lines are needed. But as long as the commands work I won’t touch the lines, because I will just mess something up and end up with trying to fix it four hours.
If it still doesn’t work for you after this change, try to restart your computer.
On Google’s official Android SDK website you can read about how to store data, work with databases and SQLite, but it’s not very much text there. Maybe there is an example that I have missed or something. Here is a link to the information on Android Developer-page:
But I did also find a very nice “tutorial”, or maybe I should call it a article with sample code, that shows how to use SQLite in Android SDK. Very helpful! Here are the 3 steps/pages:
Have fun!
I found an awesome looking, dark theme to Samsung Galaxy Spica i5700! I don’t know what to say else than it’s just awesome.
But the latest version (8.1) requires that you have a Spica phone running the custom ROM Samdroid v1.2.x or 1.3.1 deodexed. And to run Samdroid you must root your phone with the LK kernel. I only recommend doing these steps if you know what you are doing and are aware of the possible damages.
I can’t download Angry Birds Beta from the Android Market for some unknown reason. And apparently I’m not the only one with this problem. So I found a website with the Angry Birds Beta APK-file that I downloaded, copied to my Spica and installed with Astro. Yeah, so now I’m able to play some… Angry Birds! Yey!