So it's been about 5 months but I finally put my first android game on the market. Its called Reverse Gravity, a free physics based puzzle game which works on every android phone I've tested it on. It was definitelyt a long 5 months but after a crunch week I had it ready to show off at a thing my school was having, that didn't generate a lot of traffic but it was nice to have a more imminent goal so we didn't just keep working on it forever, even though I'm sure we could've; I don't think it would've ever been perfect.
Basically the game is this: Your ball starts off a level in the corner of the level and there are various gems on the screen, you win the level by collecting all the gems. You can draw lines on the screen for your ball to ride and can also reverse the gravity of the world by tapping the screen. The goal is to complete the level, reversing gravity as little as possible. Completing the levels enough to unlock the next one but you are awarded a rank from D to S (everyone loves S-Ranks). Some of the gems are coloured, and to collect a gem you have to be the same colour as it. You're ball is white and there can up to 3 colour switches on the screen at a time (primary colours) and rolling into one changes you to that colour. Sometimes you'll also have to mix colours, os if there's a green gem you'd have to hit blue and yellow to turn green then collect it. There's 36 levels right now and we do intend to do an update after schools done to add a bunch more.
Me and my buddy Tony coded the game and the art done half done by me and my girlfriend Jazeen. For those interested in code specifics it was written in java as are all android apps and for the engine we used and Engine. I looked at a lot of free android engines I thought this was the best one, it uses box2D for its physics engine and its also using the native C++ version and not the slower java port (which is mainly why we chose it). It's also pretty simple to use I imagine even if you have fairly little programming knowledge it would be a great place to start any android game.
Tony and I are in school for game programming at Humber, so we've made smaller games before but their more like demos, we've never made a full, market worthy game before.One of the hardest parts was sticking to an idea, because we just had so many with every little thing,everthing kept changing which is one reason it took so long; I bet we could've done it in something like 3 months. Art was also hard to decide on, we probably went through about 3 different themes before we eventually stuck to what we have now, its kinda a mix of a couple of them anyways. Art is one of those things that trip you up because its hard as shit to figure things like how cool a menu looks and all this other stuff and keep it one theme,finding a good artist is definitely key. Media in general is hard because sound was a bitch too. Thankfully I knew adobes products before I started so I knew photoshop and soundbooth (although I hear theres a better one then soundbooth). For the sound effects I used a sweet program called project sfxr, its a free program that helps you make 8-bit sound-effects and offers good templates and easy tweaks. For the music I would mostly find royalty free music online and cut it up/looped it.
Overall it was an awesome learning experience, and I'm more then happy to answer anyone's questions about the game or about programming for android and especially if you played the game and have any feedback what so ever I would love to hear it.
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