It's been a while since I updated this. Good news is I finally got a decent Android device - a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2.0. I wanted something fairly mid-spec and this seemed like a good choice.

The GPU is actually pretty good - I can throw around some big sprites before it starts to slow down.

I've re-written everything to use OpenGL ES 2.0 and tidied up all the code for the physics. The swinging mechanic works great with the touch screen. It feels exactly how I'd hoped it would!

Next step is to implement the level manager, I've realized that the swinging needs a BIG play area to get the most out of it, so I need a good way of managing the parallax backgrounds and culling anything that is not on screen.

Hopefully, next update will be a bit sooner...

This is a rough idea of what I have in mind for the backdrops.

Quick update - I got the telescopic arms working how I want them - they shoot out like grappling hooks and retract like the cable on a vacuum cleaner which works really well and adds some character just through the way the physics acts on them.

I've been trying to get the visual style of the game more clearly defined. I was thinking a collage type approach would work. The only problem with this is that collage tends to be made of paper and I need to have a sense of weight to the main character, so what I'm thinking now is a combination of paper collage for the farther away backgrounds and then some more metallic imagery for foreground elements and characters. I might be over thinking it and this will probably all change later.

I made a title screen to try out the style. I'm also toying with the idea of changing Robots to Robot as I don't think the game will be multi-player.

This looks pretty unimpressive, but is the first step to implementing the game mechanics. This is a ball suspended by two rope constraints. Rendering is independent of the actual physics because it was proving impossible to have good looking ropes with the right feel. The ropes actually look more like springs when they move, which works well because they are supposed to be telescopic robot arms.

I can add as many rope constraints as I like, but there will probably be only one active at a time for gameplay reasons. Imagine an orangutan swinging through the trees and you'll have a good idea of the motion I want.

First Android Tests

Well, things have got off to a slow start. I have finally managed to spend a bit of time getting my first Android app up and running. It's a steep learning curve but I've got some sprites flying around on screen and responding to touch inputs. I've also realized that the HTC wildfire I'm using isn't really up to much, so I think I'll need to invest in a slightly better phone - one with an actual GPU would be nice - at the moment the OpenGL stuff is being emulated on the CPU, so is slower than the standard Canvas.

I'm planning on building the animated objects as a hierarchy of articulated bits. The body would be the root piece and then arms, legs etc would be attached at pivot points and animated using key frames or some basic physics for secondary movement. Something a bit like this where the pins are the pivot points.

Update : Just saw Candy Crush Saga and, coincidentally, they are using a similar style. I hate the look of that game, so I won't be going with the fastener look.

There are a lot of games I want to make, but I never seem to find the time. I'm going to try making a game in my spare time - this is a record of how it goes.

There's a lot of ground work to be done. I have the basic design and game mechanics worked out so I need to get that up and running, then I can start dropping in some art. I'm going to make the game on Android which I don't have much experience with so it's going to take a bit of time to get up to speed.