Great Canadian Appathon Live Blog

Hey GB,

I'm a student of video game programming at Humber College in Ontario Canada. For backgrounds sake I've programmed games on C++,C# with XNA (eventually tested on Xbox 360) and Java. I also have experience with Unix scripting, Java Script and light web design.

This Friday is the start of this:http://greatcanadianappathon.com/. Basically a bunch of schools from across Canada can sign up to participate, and they stick you and your team of up to 3 other students in a room for 48hours and the 3 teams that make the best apps (respectively) then have to make another game. The winner of the final showdown wins the grand prize of $25,000, pretty sweet eh?

Now, I'm pretty amateur when it comes to programming on a mobile device, plus I've only really been programming for about 4 years now so I'm no expert, but at the same time I'm not a (for lack of a better word) noob. I've been making a game engine on the android platform for about 3 months now. Its a simple RTS based engine we're going to use for a game we're currently working on (if there's intrest I can post about that as well), which is coming along really well. My team is my coding friend Tony, my girl friend (the artist) Jazeen and myself Peter. As the coders Tony and I are the main people on the team in terms of design input but Jazeen is an awesome artist and her sprites are going to make whatever we need look really good and profressional. We have to make the game in line with a theme they don't tell us until the night before, and we're not aloud to bring in any code, which sucks. So were we're at now is we've chosen Android because of our expirance with its framework, and the because it uses a language a 3 year old could learn, Java. We're more then likely going to try and recreate our engine very quickly and build off that. Eventhough it was designed for an RTS style game, most of its guts are universal thus making it a great start point.

Anyways I figured it would be fun to share a live blog of sorts here for anyone interested in how games (very small ones) are made. Ask any questions or give comments OR if you're a programmer and can tell me what I'm doing wrong (which I'm sure will be lots of time) I would appreciate it a lot!

Hey GB,

I'm a student of video game programming at Humber College in Ontario Canada. For backgrounds sake I've programmed games on C++,C# with XNA (eventually tested on Xbox 360) and Java. I also have experience with Unix scripting, Java Script and light web design.

This Friday is the start of this:http://greatcanadianappathon.com/. Basically a bunch of schools from across Canada can sign up to participate, and they stick you and your team of up to 3 other students in a room for 48hours and the 3 teams that make the best apps (respectively) then have to make another game. The winner of the final showdown wins the grand prize of $25,000, pretty sweet eh?

Now, I'm pretty amateur when it comes to programming on a mobile device, plus I've only really been programming for about 4 years now so I'm no expert, but at the same time I'm not a (for lack of a better word) noob. I've been making a game engine on the android platform for about 3 months now. Its a simple RTS based engine we're going to use for a game we're currently working on (if there's intrest I can post about that as well), which is coming along really well. My team is my coding friend Tony, my girl friend (the artist) Jazeen and myself Peter. As the coders Tony and I are the main people on the team in terms of design input but Jazeen is an awesome artist and her sprites are going to make whatever we need look really good and profressional. We have to make the game in line with a theme they don't tell us until the night before, and we're not aloud to bring in any code, which sucks. So were we're at now is we've chosen Android because of our expirance with its framework, and the because it uses a language a 3 year old could learn, Java. We're more then likely going to try and recreate our engine very quickly and build off that. Eventhough it was designed for an RTS style game, most of its guts are universal thus making it a great start point.

Anyways I figured it would be fun to share a live blog of sorts here for anyone interested in how games (very small ones) are made. Ask any questions or give comments OR if you're a programmer and can tell me what I'm doing wrong (which I'm sure will be lots of time) I would appreciate it a lot!

PS Whatever I make I'll post the .apk install file for anyone who has an android phone, depending on which API we use (2.1,2.2,ect..)