New game ideas
One of the things I will be focusing in 2009 is researching new ideas for games. A lot of things changed since we released our first hacker game. I know the first thing that crosses your mind is the hot new graphics cards, but that’s not what’s on my mind. Computers are no longer what they used to be. We have so much new hardware we can take advantage of.
Think of mobile phones. They come with generous displays, fast processors, high resolution cameras, GPS, etc. This can open some very new ways to think of, and implement multiplayer games.
One of the things I became fascinated about is the ability to use the geotags from within the photos taken by mobile phone cameras, and reconstruct the real word as a 3D scene for a game. I need to figure out a way to digitally process those images, and turn a few photos of a real life factory (for example) in a similar 3D world, set somewhere in a decayed future world, as a scene for an online game. There is a lot of research and math that will be going into this, but I hope I will be able to develop a tech demo, sometime this year.
Also, I have decided to try and allocate more time to write and publish various documents for developers
and gamers. Just as I was finishing this thought, Chris from gamersdailynews.com proposed the idea of running a developer blog on his website. I think it will be a great opportunity to get in touch with gamers, listen to what they have to say, and develop our next games accordingly.
iPhone software development
Some time ago, I have decided to go into iPhone development.
After some hassles, I finally received my Mac Mini. I also bought an aluminum keyboard to go with it.
Overall, I like the hardware design, and getting used to MacOS is fun. It’s different from Windows, but it’s not something difficult to learn.
I didn’t have much time to play with it, but I installed the iPhone SDK and decided to make a simple “Hello World” application for the iPhone. It went nice and easy. The development IDE and the language (Objective C) are something different from what I have done until now.
And yes, this means there will be Hacker Evolution for the iPhone 
BlackBerry game development in one day
Recently I got a BlackBerry 7130g device. I picked it up for 2 reason: It was cheap (around $30) and I wanted to see what’s a BlackBerry like.
I liked it so much that I have started using it as my main phone. (I also have a Windows Mobile phone running the BlackBerry (BIS) service, so the push email thing wasn’t that new).
Since it supports J2ME I decided to give it a try. All I can say that the BlackBerry JDE is a wonderful programming tool. The installation went smooth, and I decided to see what can I do in one day with it. My Java programming skills are very limited … actually this my first application written in J2ME.
I decided to write a small puzzle game implementing the famous Chinese game, Daughter In The Box (also known as: Hua Rong Dao).
The purpose of the game is to slide the puzzle pieces until you manage to slide the biggest piece (the daughter) to the exit point. It’s a very captivating and challenging game. Here is how it looks:
I made the entire game code, and the graphics in one day. The game is fully functional.
Here is the link, if you want to download it, and try it on your BlackBerry:
Daughter In A Box for the BlackBerry.
Also, here are the links to the .cod and .jar files.