Game Progress

I have added a font class and a sprite sheet that contains the bitmapped digits for the game.  It was a little bit tricky since I had to turn off the default scaling that normally occurs when reading in bitmaps.  I created some simple 8x8 bitmaps in gimp and used decodeResource and createBitmap to load them into my game.  Now I have a score displayed in my game.

Game progress

I have added bricks and an input component to handle touch events.  The InputComponent gets the x and y values scales them from the screen values to world coordinates and adds them to a queue.  This queue gets checked during the game loop and the Point object gets sent to the World class to be handled.

Strange Behavior Fixed

I found that by remembering the ball's last position and moving it back after a collision and making sure I only change the ball's direction once that now the ball bounces as expected, no more u-turns or strange behavior. I also ignore the ball hitting the back of the paddle so no more getting stuck.

Android Breakout Clone update

I have the ball and paddle displaying on the screen and the ball bounces off the wall boundaries OK. I just have a problem of the ball hitting the paddle, bouncing off and then doing a u-turn to hit the paddle again! The ball also sometimes gets stuck between the paddle and the bottom of the screen. Any suggestions?

It Lives!!!

I took the gamethread class from the Replica Island code and added it to my project. I also took the GLSurfaceView class from the Sprite Method Test code and am using it to call a simple renderer that does nothing but render a gray background. This is going to be the guts of my Breakout clone. I am going to follow the Jayway Team OpenGL ES Tutorial to learn the basics of drawing with OpenGLES.

Check Out Replica Island

While cruising around the internet looking for Android game examples, I came across Replica Island a game designed by Chris Pruett. He has a couple of youtube videos: Google I/O 2009 – Writing Real-Time Games for Android and Google I/O 2010 – Writing real-time games for Android redux. I highly recommend aspiring game developers to watch these. He is an experienced game developer and you can learn a lot from what he has to say. He talks about Game Engine Architecture, which I found particularly interesting. He also talks about using three threads to run your game, an input thread, a rendering thread, and a game thread. I think this is key to getting good performance on a mobile device. Chris also has a Replica Island blog, check it out, especially some of the older articles.

Finally shipped

Well after a long and difficult road, we finally shipped. So my day job should be taking less time for a few months giving me more time to work on my hobby.

I am starting to investigate Android, I have installed Eclipse and the ADT plugin. I have gotten the "hello world" program running on the emulator. My plan is to make a simple Breakout clone in java with openGL. This should help me become familiar with openGLES and the Android OS.