Programming Adventures of Grawl

I’ve been trying to create Android apps on and off over the last year, but my projects are always too big for me to handle. Today I decided to create a simple project (random password generator) and I actually finished it! Peanuts for most of you guys, but I’m happy

(Now to improve the code and actually work on the interface)

As I posted before, I’m going to attempt getting a Cisco certificate (CCNA, but first CCENT). Buying these books costs a lot of money though. Well not a lot, but it does cost money. And most of the time I’ll be sitting in front of a computer anyway while reading said books.

And then I found Safari Books Online. With over 21k titles and with a nice coupon, you can get unlimited access to their library for around $30/month. I signed up, because not only are all the Cisco books there (the latest prints, mind you), but also a lot of books on other stuff. Stuff like Android. I found this book on Android gaming development I’m going to give a shot. And if I don’t like it, I can just check out another book!

General

Market Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.firemaplegames.thelostcity
Orientation: Horizontal
Tested on: Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

Review

I will admit I never heard of this game until I saw it was on sale for about half a Euro on Google Play (yes, I hate the new name, but we just have to accept the market is gone). For that kind of money, which I waste in a tenfold every day on my pack of smokes, I figured it couldn’t hurt. Hold on, going for a smoke, brb.

The game tells the story about… I have no clue. The story is paper-thin and it involves someone’s grandmother and this anonymous narrator visiting some island for said grandmother. The island has some kind of magic that allows it to change seasons on the go. You might think “great! it’s like Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons on my phone/tablet!”. No. No! Bad reader!

It’s not really clear what your goal is, other then proving your grandmother wrong (or right, but I like to think we’re going for the first one). You point-and-click your way around the island and solve puzzles.

You get dumped on the island and the first minute I was wondering why the fuck I couldn’t use my insane superhuman powers to break the brick wall in front of me. Then I found out I could go left and right by tapping the sides of my screen. Thanks for the lack of indicators, game!

Soon I wished I never learned how to move around the island. Not because the game isn’t pretty enough to look at or anything, but the island is pretty big and it’s mostly confusing. Some branches look so much alike that I often found myself backtracking to go to the actual path I wanted to take. There’s a map though, but especially in the last part of the game I still found myself lost at times and some kind of teleport/warp ability wouldn’t have hurt. I understood why they did it though.

The game is pretty short, and all the walking around adds a bit more time to the game. Even though the game does feature the whole change of seasons thing, it’s pretty linear and hardly involves any thinking at all. All the essential solutions are stored in your journal and when you actually found something important it’s made pretty obvious you’re going to need it later. With later I mean two screens later, in most cases. Hardly anything in this game makes you think for yourself. And when you actually get stuck, I have the feeling it’s actually not your fault. For example, when it’s winter, you have to backtrack all the way to the very first screen to find yourself a flower. A flower you’ll need somewhere near the end of the game. If you forgot to pick it up, that means you’ll have to change the season back to winter (and get lost doing so), just to pick up the flower, change the seasons back and find your way back to where the flower was needed (and get lost doing so). But as I said, the game is mostly linear, so this doesn’t happen too often. I don’t mind looking around for stuff, but I do hate it when it makes no sense.

Final score: 6/10 – In the end I may have needed an hour to finish the game. At some points I got a feeling I was playing Myst on my tablet. That feeling didn’t last very long and I mostly felt bored or frustrated by the game. It’s a cheap game, and you’ll get a cheap experience from it. It certainly isn’t a bad game, but don’t expect it to blow your mind wide open. If you don’t like adventure games, it’s almost certain you’re not going to enjoy this one.

After creating like 5 apps that’d show my name (thanks for pointing that out SupSuper) and getting used to how menus work, I decided to try my hand at the very first app that created this blog and my interest in the Android SDK. Read this entry if you need to be reminded.

So instead of first creating working menus and stuff that shows my name, I decided to work on the engine. And the first goal is to create a tile with icons. But what creates those times? It had to be random. So I made a 2D array for where the tiles need to go. And that is as far as I got. But that’s good enough for now. After all, I’m not in a rush.

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2012/03/android-apps-break-50mb-barrier.html

That’s all.

General

Market Link: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.sega.sonic4epi
Orientation: Horizontal
Tested on: Samsung Galaxy Note

Review

I used to grow up in my childhood with a Sega Genesis (Megadrive II in Europe). First game I ever played on a console was Sonic the Hedgehog. I fell in love with the blue icon. Not much later I got Sonic the Hedhgehog 2, and I fell in love again, and also a bit with Tails ‘Miles’ Prower. I can go on about Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles etc., but let’s not go there. Let’s not even go on about Sonic 2. The goal from Sega was to re-make the very first Sonic game. At least, that’s what I think it is.

When you start the game, it starts with a replica of Green Hill Zone, the first zone you’ll see in Sonic 1. You start running right, jump for the first three rings and bump into the first enemy and lose said rings. So far so good. For the entire first level it actually was a good run. Hold right, jump every now and then and finish the level. So far so good. I even managed to jump into the bonus level, which you spawn as a giant ring by having at least 50 rings when reaching the end of the level and jumping into it. Missed it? Your problem, you probably can’t run back fast enough to jump in it again. Classic Sonic right there.

But then it suddenly changed. In the original Sonic the bonus level is a rotating map that goes either left or right, and you have to control Sonic through it. It’s hard to explain, so watch this video to see what it looked like. You couldn’t control the direction, unless you hit the small icons that’d do it for you. In Sonic 4, you tilt your device left or right to move the stage around. I’m not a fan of these kind of “tilt your device around to influence control” kind of things. It’s probably why the only games I ever played on my Wii are the Zelda and Mario games. Other than that though, the bonus stages are pretty much the same; navigate around the stage, avoid hitting “goal” icons and get the Chaos Emerald. O, and watch your time. Yup, the bonus stages are timed now. Like it doesn’t suck enough to move your device around like an idiot.

In the end I did end the bonus stage and gained my first emerald. I was a Sonic god once again. The second level started, and I was ready to show this game who was boss. That dream soon shattered though, because I had to move left to proceed. I tried, but instead I crouched. And I probably got hit by something, or died, or threw my phone on the ground (it’s a new phone, I didn’t do that) or whatever. I found out the controls are a bit crappy. Throughout the game I found that the controls to move Sonic around are a bit too small and I had a lot of trouble moving Sonic around as quickly as I’d like in later zones. On a tablet it might not be a problem, but on my Note (5.3″) it just felt crowded. It’s a bit weird, because Sonic CD was released around the same time and that has much better controls. But then again, we’re talking about Sega here. If you need constistancy, look somewhere else.

Something that was introduced in later games such as the jump dash are either hit or miss. Sometimes in order not to get hit (and lose rings) you’ll need to jump dash a few times into enemies. I’m not a big fan of this. That’s pretty much a personal taste though and I’m sure people from half a generation later that grew up with it when they first came in contact with Sonic don’t mind as much (let’s say Sonic Advance and later, or as I’d like to call it whenever Sonic games started to suck).

Sound and music are never a problem with Sega. It’s not the classic Sonic music, and it’s a bit generic, but not bad in any way. Nothing more to say about that.

Final score: 6/10 — It’s not a bad game, and I’d have had a lot more fun if I could control Sonic a bit better. And one final note: This game will drain your battery. By playing for about half an hour, around 30% of the battery was also gone. Not a game for on the go, I’m afraid.

I have to make sure my priorities are straight, and in order to achieve at least something in life, I’ve decided to aim for a CCNA certificate. I’ve got the books, and possibly the time. Let’s go!

Man, all these ideas for Android stuff, but right now I just hit a wall. A wall called restrictions. I wanted to create a savegame manager, mainly because I have my phone (so I can play games at work — if you’re my boss, I totally don’t play games at work btw) and my tablet. They have the same games on them sometimes, and I don’t want to manually move files around. Some cloud system should be easy to create, right?

Nope. Most apps save their data (including savegames) on the root of the system, like /Android/data/com.app.app/savegames/. Unless the creator of the app specifically choose to share their data (and why would they), you can’t access that data without rooting your phone. As a developer, you can only access your own data and the data on the sd-card. So either the developer needed to allow people peeking into their data or have their files on an external card. Not very likely.

So in order to create this savegame manager, I’d either need to stick with a few games or create an app that’d require a rooted phone. Not sure if I’m up for either. Mainly because finding documentation on how to create this kind of stuff isn’t easy to find.

Google and Unix is a weird combination, when you think about it.

At least the author did one good thing!

Soon this baby will be mine. For… eeh… Android development reasons, ofcourse… Just like that tablet I got!