Tiny Domination

This game is an RTS in which you build up some planet resources and try to take over every planet on the map.

Page link with screenshot, more information, and download: http://pwna.net/doodles/tiny-domination/

Flow

Pretty simple and can be boring. Basic premise is to move your mouse over things to destroy them and prevent them from reaching the center of the screen. Great music though. Best I’ve made so far, but it still has some aspects I don’t like. “Unwinnable” – get a high score!

Page link with screenshot, more information, and download: http://pwna.net/doodles/flow/

Defender of Avior

Hands-off; you have pretty much no control in this game, but it’s somewhat an RTS. You just gotta produce a lot of units and defend against the enemy onslaught. It never ends, so I categorize it also as “unwinnable” – get a high score.

Page link with screenshot, more information, and download: http://pwna.net/doodles/defender-of-avior/

Okay so all of that was fun, so let’s look at the future. First off is that the Playbook OS update kind of killed my game’s FPS due to a bug that made some aspects of HTML5 slower. I am going to remake this game from scratch, NOT using HTML5 so it actually gets more than 1 fps again. In the meantime, I’ve removed it from App World completely to avoid giving users a bad experience. Sorry about that, it’ll be a while before I get around to the remake.

Also of interest is that I’m working on another game for the Playbook. This one will be my first commercial game and while I do not expect it to be very successful (probably < 50 downloads total with maybe 5 in the first month) it’s a necessary step forward for me. I’m really gonna pull out the polish on this one! I’m also planning on making it a fairly simple and short game, and pricing it at $0.99. With any luck I’ll be done with it and submitting by the end of this month, hopefully a bit earlier.

Keep your goals realistic people! I have pretty much nil budget, much less any marketing budget. I’ll be looking into this more though as I near launch.

Honestly, it is a pain to begin publishing with Blackberry. In my case, I specifically chose to target only Blackberry’s newest shiny device, the Playbook, which is a tablet. And well, the only reason I am targeting this device is because it should have the power to run the games I create, and the folks over at RIM were handing out Playbooks like candy to developers who submitted applications to the App World (and had them accepted). Hey, getting a free tablet on par with the iPad2 for free is nothing to laugh at, plus it would give me a chance to develop more applications for the device. This is pretty smart on RIM’s part, because one of the big barriers to entry for developing on a new platform is deciding on whether or not you should buy the hardware. The other monetary choice was made pretty easy, as RIM removed all fees for setting up a developer account and submitting applications. Now they will have people like me who plan on submitting more applications, which will end up making both parties money.

Back to reality: the main reason most people (myself included) don’t like the process of developing for Blackberry is just how slow it is. To begin, you need to do nothing other than download and install the SDK’s you wish to use. These things can get pretty massive, but that’s the nature of SDK’s I suppose. When it comes down to wanting to package the application for App World distribution, the real annoyances arise.

It’s not entirely clear if you need to sign an application that is free for distribution on App World, but I chose to go ahead and do it just in case. The initial setup is not an instantaneous process. You need to ask RIM’s servers nicely for a key to develop for their phones and tablets, and then in a couple of hours it will oblige you. One of the immediate problems is how seriously they take security — once you generate your certificates (or whatever it is), you cannot generate them again. You’ve got to back up the files it generated somewhere or you run into some serious issues.

Once you decide your application is ready to be pushed to App World, you need to create a Vendor account. All of these accounts are approved manually (for anti-fraud I imagine). If you want to sell an application, the process gets even slower, because you are requested to provide government-issued I.D. Luckily for me, I decided to make my first app free. It took about 2 days for my account to be approved. After this account approval process, you have to go through the submission process which is blob of distress on its own. The problems I have with that are described at the end of this post.

Creation

I purchased this nifty little tool named GameMaker:HTML5 a while ago. I have been using GameMaker for years, and despite its many flaws, I love the software. I decided to purchase the HTML5 edition of this software mainly because it opens up easy game development for mobile devices. Seemingly soon, YoYo Games plans on releasing a new version of GameMaker, named Studio, which will allow for the creation of native Android and iOS applications (among others), but I just couldn’t wait that long.

So, what? Well, I had an Android device and I had never considered Blackberry as a viable platform before. Based solely on the premise for developing for Android (and to doodle with PC web games) I bought GameMaker. My plan all along has been to use the wonderful software Phonegap to compile my HTML5 games into “native” applications. The reason for this is that any version of Android less than 2.3 and iOS have no sound or severely limited sound, as well as being able to easily tell an application is running in the browser due to the impossibility of making the game full screen. Phonegap has an audio API I can interface with and hey, saying you have apps in the market is just awesome, as well as the prospect of selling them. Distributing an application through marketplaces instead of via the web means I can control to some extent the devices which will run the application, meaning I can be sure it will run on the devices it’s downloaded to. Trying to market HTML5 games to mobile game portals is just annoying at the moment due to all of these compatibility issues and limitations , so for the time being I have decided to skip that prospect.

So, what? Well, Phonegap is available for Blackberry too. After spending a little time reading the Phonegap and Blackberry docs, I was able to repackage my game made with GameMaker:HTML5 for the Playbook and get it running in the simulator. You know what? I have no real knowledge of how Blackberry’s WebWorks, well, works. The default audio GameMaker provides works happily, meaning I didn’t have to create my own Phonegap media bridge.

Another annoyance pops up here. You must be using a 32 bit JDK, and it must be in your path. Well great, now I had to go remove JDK 7′s 64 bit self from my path and fiddle with things until I got the JDK I wanted showing up in the path correctly. I think this odd requirement arises from Ant, but I’m really not too interested in the details.

The Playbook simulator is quite a beast to deal with. RIM ended up choosing VMWare as the platform their simulator VM would run under, and this is both a blessing and a curse. The main benefit I see with this is that it is a cross platform application (although by reading the forums you can determine some problems exist on non-Windows systems). The very big downside is that this is a commercial application. The free VMWare Player is fine for some scenarios, but it is limited. For instance, you cannot change the hardware allocations given to the VM. The Playbook has a dual core processor, and RIM recommends setting the VM to use 2 cores. To do this, you have to purchase VMWare Workstation. Sigh. Well, it’s not to steep of a cost. Adding a second core does improve the responsiveness quite a bit, but I still would say that for most games it is an inadequate method for testing. My game was Tic Tac Toe, and even though the performance was noticeably slower than on PCs, it was easily within an acceptable range, even if the actual device ran the game as slow as it was in the simulator.

On the Playbook developer site, it also recommends that you test your application in the Ripple Mobile Environment Emulator. This thing is just terrible. It’s slower than when I run the application under the simulator’s  browser (or the packaged application). It’s a nice idea, but not well executed. I wouldn’t recommend bothering with this at all, but if you want to be my guest.

Origins

Originally when the free Playbook offer was announced, it was for converted Android applications only. My plan was originally going to be to port a version of my Tic Tac Toe over by simply repackaging the application. No dice. The Playbook’s “Android player” did not support approximately 20 things libGDX utilized. LibGDX is a fantastic little library that I was using to develop for Android. It provides an easy way to draw to OpenGL as well as a bunch of other goodies. Anyway, packaging this application failed so I decided to make a Phonegap application for Android and repackage that. I don’t know what drove me to believing an interpreter running inside an emulator running inside a simulator would be fast, but as you may have guessed, it was terribly slow. (I was really just too lazy after initially discovering I couldn’t repackage my Android application to setup a Phonegap for Blackberry environment). Among being slow, it had some graphical and input problems so I had to scrap it, suck it up, and install and configure a new development environment.

Submitting

If you’ve finally managed to create an application and have it packaged neatly, trying to submit the application to App World will be a slap in the face. If you take things nice and slow, you should be able to figure everything out.

It starts off by asking you for some basic information like SKU, which you make up, then it goes through a series of questions to determine the rating, then you can choose from a variety of odd license options. They are interesting concepts, especially having a Trial/Paid app. Unlike how most other markets operate in which you create two separate applications for free and paid versions, you can do that all in one go. You just have to upload two different packages and the store should take care of everything for you. A downside I noticed to this is that in the market these are listed as paid applications, so developers are shoving in all capitals in their titles and descriptions that it free with a paid version.

You are asked to upload some promotional graphics like a storefront image and screenshots, but it also asks for a 480×480 product icon. What? Was something wrong with your 48×48 application product icon? Unless you’ve used the App World, this will make no sense to you, because it doesn’t appear on their online portion of the store. Basically this 480×480 icon is what’s displayed in the App World, then when you click on that icon you get to view the other promotional images.

One notice that may be easy to miss is that if you are developing games for the Playbook, you cannot distribute them to South Korea (unless you have the approval of some game board in South Korea) so you have to manually create that exclusion. OK we’re done! But wait, it never asked me to upload my application!

Right, so you just created a “product” in which you have releases that fall below it. So you click on add a release and start going through it. Your first instinct is to read the entire page (or at least mine was). Here I noticed I could add a file bundle. Perfect! So I add one of these bundles, which is basically just a way of saying what language and device/OS your application supports. Then you realize you still haven’t upload your application, so you scroll back up to the top and upload your .bar. KAPOW! That was the sound of you getting hit in the face with illogical nonsense! You can’t upload your .bar file! You have to make a zip file with that .bar file inside and upload that.

Now you can notice you magically have a new file bundle created for you. You can either delete that one and then change the one you made previously to use the file you just uploaded, or you can delete the one you created and enter in all of the details in the one it created. BLEH!

But what exactly should your target OS be? This came to bite me. Originally I specified 1.0.0 assuming my application would magically work, but it didn’t. It turned out the OS requirement of Phonegap was 1.0.7, which I only found by extracting the .bar file (yes, this is an archive) and editing the manifest file and seeing that it listed its minimum OS requirement as 1.0.7. Why the online submission tool couldn’t have just read this attribute is beyond me…

What do you do if you mess up something with your file bundle but already submitted? Make a new one. The only thing you can change is the supported devices, and since there’s only one Playbook so far you can’t really change anything. Oh, and you can’t delete previous releases either.

And now you get to wait the estimated 5-10 business days for your application to be reviewed by someone. I think in the process of adding a new release to fix my OS version may have reset the timer, but who can be sure. In total, it took my application 15 business days to get approved, and although submitting a new release with the fixed OS requirement probably slowed down this problem, I think it was faster than it would have been if I waited for the first version to be declined. For the curious, the base version 1.0 was declined and the fixed 1.0.1 was accepted at the same time.

Overall

I think a lot of developers are quick to get up in arms over everything. Sure some aspects of the application submission process are a bit convoluted, but it makes sense for the most part and really isn’t terribly difficult. The most difficult parts are making sure you package and sign correctly and waiting so long for everything to be manually approved everywhere.

I have mentioned previously that I do plan on submitting more applications (in my case, games) to the App World despite any grievances mentioned above. The only really pain I’m going to have in the future is when I create an application that I want money for, because then I have to wait for another step in account approval.

Finished product

There are still a couple of things I would like to improve in this game:

• More sound effects
• More animations
• Two player mode
• Third A.I. difficulty mode

For now, though, I am working on an game that I plan on releasing commercially to the Playbook.

For now I need to replace the default wordpress theme. I’ve also disabled comments globally because in the year or two I had my previous blog installation, I had only about 5 legitimate comments, and although akismet did a fairly good job, I still had a lot of spam to clear our manually. If you need to get in touch with me, see the about page on the main website.