How I made an Android game from scratch in 23 days

Yes same here I want to know more

I recently wrote a game from scratch in one week over at my blog (http://jonbho.net). In C, and the source code is available. Still pending to revamp the design and publish it, hope to do so in the next few weeks.

You could always watch those 24 hour live game programming sessions. I know Notch did one awhile ago that was pretty entertaining.

Kloonie games used to make a game in under a week about once a month. I used to enjoy the lessons he learned and seeing the evolution. It eventually resulted in crayon physics which was a really interesting game. http://www.kloonigames.com/blog/

I did a similar thing. Only it took 2 years.

http://pixelated.postagon.com/5g437329d

I win!

You might be interested in Shining Rock Software's site [1]. Its a single developer creating a world-building game called Banished, and he has some good insights into the problems of building a complex product on his own.

[1] http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/

Initially, I also got confused by Actors, Scenes, etc. and did not use it. I figured it out later, but a lot of code was written already. In my code I have a lot of arrays and objects that represent the objects in the game. For example, I have an array named Fleet that keeps track of all aliens. The I have an array named Bullets, and one named Particles and one named FloatingTexts, etc. Now, all these would be Actors and you would place them in Scene instead of having a lot of separate array.

I also used Sprites for some stuff, but I also have a lot of pure batch.draw() calls for one-off copying directly from texture. When you use the Sceen model, you use Actors instead of Sprites.

I used to make games using SDL, so I'm used to blitting the graphics purely by coordinates and just build my own stuff over it, but Scene-Actor stuff is very well done, I will use it for my next game for sure. It also comes with some nice UI elements, which I also had to invent myself in mine code.

The best resource was asking questions at Stack Overflow. You can also google for some stuff, but beware, some of the code out there is suboptimal as you can see in my post about making screenshots.

Yes. It also served as an incentive to keep me going. I did not want to have an empty day without making any progress, especially as some people were reading the blog from the start and I did not want to lose their attention by skipping.

It was mostly 12-14 hours a day, with maybe 2-3 days of 19 hours. Actually, I'm feeling a little sleep deprived now, so I'll probably make it up in the next couple of days.

There where other stuff I also did, like doing a lot of testing and bugfixing, or reading the docs, but those were too boring to blog about.

You did notice the word, "Android"?

Thanks for such detailed feedback.

Wave 70 is not a bug. The trick is in the Grows When Shot description. This boss gains energy when shot, but loses when he releases a drone. You really shouldn't shoot at it at all, just destroy its minions until he shrinks to zero. Hmmm, maybe this was a design error on my part, mixing deep thinking in a shooter game, I'm not sure?

As for the settings going back to main menu, you're right, this is a bug. It used to work properly, but I refactored some code just before releasing and this got broken. I'm uploading a fixed version as I write this, it should be up in the Play Store in a couple of hours.

Having to pause shooting to Reload is deliberate. At first, there were no Reload button, but adding it added a dimension of difficulty to the game, and made it more interesting.

As for the package name... it's complicated. As you can see in my blog at Day 1, I choose this name at first, and then I built a libGDX project using it. At some point when I finally decided on Drone Invaders name, I tried to refactor and Eclipse was not able to do everything. libGDX projects are set up by some kind of a setup wizard, that does some find/replace of strings and whatnot, so it seemed impossible that I would be able to do this manually. Although, not that I think of it, maybe I could create a new empty project using the wizard, and then copy all the source code there. However, I would lose all the ratings and stats I have so far on Google Play as it would be treated as a completely new game. :(

And I guess I will have to make e-mail clickable now ;)

I developed most of the game on SGS2 which has 480x800 resolution which covers more than 70% of the market (depending on whose stats you look at). Then I tested on Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets, and bunch of phones that friends have and I've seen ugly streching effect, so I first tried just to keep the aspect ratio with black bars (letterboxing and pillarboxing), but this did not look too good.

Then I enlarged the background nebulas and stars textures and the game adapts to the screen. If you have 16:10 screen it fits perfectly. If you have wider screen, there would be some free space at the sides. On Nexus 7 and 10, that's just some 10% and it's hardly noticable.

On devices that are wider than 16:10, say some phones with 480x854 resolution, I simply extend the playing field upwards. So it's actually a little bit easier to play on those devices as aliens have more space to travel before they reach the bottom. I thought about increasing the initial speed modifier for those devices from 1 to 1.0675, but I did not do it. I somehow wanted to speed of the game to be constant.

Using libGDX as a library makes testing all this very easy, because you can run in on your desktop as a regular Java application and you can resize the window to whatever you like. I have 1680x1050 monitor, so all phones and most tablets fit the screen.

The only thing I regret is not having Nexus 10 at the very start and make the game optimal for 2560x1600 resolution. There are many popular Android games that do not support this fully (graphics get blurred). The only 2D game I've seen so far is Angry Birds Star Wars II. So maybe if I supported this high resolution, I would have a better shot at being featured in the Play Store, since competition is low. If this version goes well, maybe this is exaclty what I will do next: build a HD version.

Why do you say it stalled? Its been on 0.9.8 for long time, but all the cool stuff is in the nightlies. And 0.9.9 is just around the corner.

I used Inkscape for various icons (like shield, etc.) and Gimp for all the rest.

Sure. Here it is:

http://bigosaur.com/blog/droneinvaders15.apk

I hope you'll be able to run it.