I’ve now got the first start to my first game using the engine. Ok, granted if you’ve seen my test game it doesn’t look like much has happened, and actually there hasn’t. Today’s work has mostly evolved around testing different screen sizes, SDKs and changing the layout of menus, while messing with my Linux box and Windows 7 box.

But anyway, I feel like it is a good time to show this preliminary view of the game. So, for your eyes only:

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.