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.

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!

  So I've been testing the beta for the 64-bit version of Windows 7 and I was really impressed. Most of my likes about were based on its Aero theme because I went from XP to 7.  The beta was good, a few features were missing that I needed but aside from that solid. Recently I upgraded to the full retail version on account of I'm a member of MSDN (microsoft developers network) and boy did they fuck it up somehow. I had to turn off numerous animations for aero to look acceptable (granted I dont have the best video card in my laptop but it worked just fine on beta). The also implemented a bunch of new security features which seems more annoying then the "Cancel or Allow" thing everyone always complains about vista. Now regular system folders are blocked off to even adminstrators and to unlock them you need to go through several tabs to issue permissions. God I miss XP, but I put 4 gigs of ram into my laptop so If I were to go back I would need the 64-bit version and I hear nothing but bad things about XP's 64 bit. Well this definetly sucks!    

So after many tries of getting a podcast together I gave up, it seemed no body wanted to do one, that was untill I heard user casual_terror (aka Stuart)  was looking for help with his site/podcast. Thus I threw my hat into the ring and along with a girl named Trish we now have an awsome site and an even awomer podcast! The site is http://american-gamer.webs.com and we do news, reviews and most importantly a weekly podcast. I hope you guys like it and please send me any feedback you might have!

So before Highschool and in my first year I didnt know anyone who shared my love of games. It wasnt untill about grade 10 when I met someone (now my very good friend) Sean. He loved games as much as I did and I was pretty happy, I had someone to play and talk about games with. Now 2 years have passed and Im in my final semester of Grade 12, and have just been accepted to college for computer programming. However Sean doesnt play video games anymore, and niether do a lot of my other friends. Im pretty well back into my rutt. Just recently Ive been indulging myself in more single player focused games such as Fable 2 and Fallout 3. But I do miss playing multplayer games and such with my friends. Is this the drop-out time for most people where they stop caring about video games? Well...guess im going to go play some more fable...*sigh*

Hey everyone. I just wanted to let everyone who checks my page out that me and a few other users are gonna try a bit of podcasting, so stay tuned in the next little while cause were gonna whip up a beta. Thanks everyone!

I recently went to Fan Expo in Toronto Ontario. For those of you who've never heard of it, Its a multishow that happens once a year in Toronto. It covers Gaming, Comics, Horror, SiFi and  Anime. The gaming part is never really big but this year they had Canada's Halo Team along with some of the Best Halo 3 Clans from all over the world. Watching these guys play is impressive, When this one guy would use a Battle Rife the cross hair would never leave his head, he was perfect. But even though I watch these amazing gamers do their thing, I cant help but think to myself  "If I played as much as these guys played, I could probably be just as good." After I got was in a video game mood so I dowloaded the movie "King Of Kong" which dipects a man named Steve Wiebe attempting to gain to world record for Donkey Kong from worl Champ Billy Mitchel. Anyways after watching this I decided to check out some world high scores, below is the video of the Champ of Tetris for the nes. After watching these guys, I think to myself  "Holly shit, never in a million years...". Did the older games take more skill than the ones today? Could Billy Mitchell use his intense Donkey Kong/Pacman Skillz to own everyone in his path at Halo 3?

First off I would like to thank GoranP's blog for bringing this to my attention. Ok so this girl on http://www.bigfatblog.com is complaining about demeaning women in the upcoming game "Fat Princess".

 "Does it offend me more as a feminist or as a fat activist? I can't decide."

Ok so I guess this is just another person to add to the "Just doesnt Get it" list of people who try and make their opinons  about video games seem important. Take fox News For example embded below is an interview done about Mass Effect and its sex scenes. Fox News brought in an "expert" as well as a video game correspondant who generally seemed to know whats up. The thing that really caught my attention in the interview is when things begin to get heated and the Video Game Correspondant asks the "expert" if shes even ever actually played the game and she respondes with a very snooty "NO!". Why does it seem people who dont play video games just cant understand them. I mean, I dont watch many movies, but i can appriciate artistic view and such. It seems people like this always are around to blow SOMETHING out of preportion. Does anyone else have any stories like this? Please comment with maybe even video links, i always like reading or watching these kind of things.

Its 4 am...i should be tired, my eyes are bloodshot cause ive been up since 6am, but im energetic, its a very unnatural feeling, and what caused this you ask? ENDO RUSH! I dont know whats in it but according to the daily requirement section its giving me 4167%

Ok, So I guess it wasnt untill 1:30 am I relised California's time zone is far different from that of Ontarios, that being said I needed to get up the next morning at 9 for work, I figured it would release at 12 am, I spend an hour, get an 8 hour sleep and be ready for work the next morning. Then I found out about the time difference and figured out that their 12 am was my 3 am, So I stayed up untill  3 am playing Uno, while "Refreash Every" (a firefox addon that refreashes a page every set number of seconds) refreashed GB every 5 seconds. I finally gave up and went to bed at 3:15 cause i was too tired. Then I arose this morning very very very tired and angry I had to go to work so tired, however seeing the Giant Bomb had been launched and that I had about 30 minutes to spare I got working creating my profile and trying out the page adding. Ive subbmitted 2 that were just kind of floating on the top of my head, MissingNo for the character page and the Stun Knife from MGS4 on the thing page. I think figuring out which page something should go on is going to be an on going battle with the contributers and Lucadeer. Nano Machines for one, I didnt check if it was already on here or not, but is it a thing or a concept. Oh well I suppose differenciating things like that will get easier with time. Ok well im going to go submit some stuff, I have such high hopes for this site, never dreamed something this awesome would surface.