Since sometime last autumn, I decided that the time I used to spend on my PhD work in the evenings, was badly substituted with TV. I therefore started working on a Android game platform, mostly to keep learning new skills, and enjoy coding something different from the normal work code.

I’ve now managed to get to a stage where the goals for my game engine is closing to an end. The engine is a simplistic world, where boxes, balls and holes of different sizes, colours and attributes can be instantiated, and rules can be made between them. The biggest problem I have faced was making the engine smooth, or indeed, as smooth as a Garbage Collected environment, like Java, can become. I figured out that having different parts of the game in different threads from the system thread is a must, and I managed to minimize garbage collection 7 times by optimizing the use of internal objects. So now, the “stutter” that is in the system comes primarily from outside sources. The only thing I need now is to finish the persistency system behind the engine and I’ll be going into “real” game making territory.

I’ve already started on a Bob / couronne type of game, which I have set up as a debugging platform in the engine building stage.