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.
Remembering the old times.
My dear friend Dan Berte emailed me in the morning with some memories of vintage technologies and gadgets.
A couple of things we both missed:
- Ericsson cell phones which we used to connect to a slow Internet (9600 bps). It was only Ericsson back then, no Sony 
- Grayscale LCD powered cell phones and PDA’s we used for email. (there wasn’t any spam back then. You couldn’t include links, html or images in an email)
- Infrared connections (and the 10 minutes spent on figuring out why it doesn’t work, just find to out the coffee cup was in it’s way)
I just remembered a couple of things I did (over) 10 years ago:
- I coded a piece of software in assembler language to record and compress 7 seconds of music and play it back. We didn’t have any iPods back then and being able to use a delta algorithm to compress the music sounded pretty good. The code was written on a small computer which had a Z80 CPU and about 30Kb of memory to store data.
- I also coded a poker game under CP/M. The computer was only able to display texts, so I used some nice tweaks to draw the cards with *’s and other funky characters. It was the first game I have developed, about 4-5 years before I wrote my first PC hacker game. I didn’t know what marketing and selling games was back then, but all I know is that the 2 computer running CP/M back then, were mainly used to play my Poker game. It was an awesome feeling.
Those were the days when technology was used at it’s best. It was amazing what people could accomplish with tiny amounts of memory, slow CPU’s and very slow Internet connections.
I first started browsing the Internet using Lynx. I used to read my emails with Pine. Using telnet to connect to the college servers for some Internet access was the only way to go.
This things are pretty much like a Zippo lighter. They never get old fashioned
One of my many projects that still lie around on my desk, is to create a small virtual Internet, and allow people to connect to it through telnet or dial-up.
Bring back some of those old days and vintage technologies we so much miss.
Switching to a new payment processing company
In the past 6 years since exosyphen studios was started, we have switched through several payment processing companies, for various reasons (looking for better fees, better service, etc). Through the years, things started to slowly get better. We went from paying a 20% cut to the processing company 6 years ago, down to 13.9%. I left RegNow about 3 years ago when I have fallen for their newest *scam*. I was offered the chance to switch to a new fee schedule of just 6.9% + $1. It looked great and I went ahead, without reading the very small fine print. Then I noticed that all customers were forced to also purchase a $6.99 “Extended download insurance”. Since this is something we already offer for free for all our products, I didn’t wanted it added to each order, and even then, force customers to pay for it. They could however uncheck the options manually, but I didn’t like the way my shopping cart looked, with an extra payable item added automatically. I tried switching back to the old fee schedule, but that didn’t work, as it was *no longer possible* (so I was told).
Everything was fine with the 13.9% from Emetrix, but over the time, trying to keep competitive prices, made me start looking for an alternative.
After searching for a while and finding several options which were good, I was still stuck on at least one item on my checklist not being met by every company. This is how we eventually came across FastSpring, which successfully passed all my requirements for a new payment processing company. This were:
- Lower processing fee, at least under 10% (We got 8.9% which reduced our processing costs per product, by 5%)
- Lower minimum fee amount, to allow us to sell cheaper software bits (We got $1 minimum instead of the $3 we had before).
- Bi-monthly payments within reasonable time (Instead of receiving January’s money on February the 15th, it’s better to receive it on January the 25th and February the 10th)
Extra goodies we got, without expecting them:
- Processing of PayPal payments (it simplified our shopping cart and order logistics a lot)
- Very fast and good tech support (it feels great to receive a reply on the same day, and most or all of the time in less then 1 hour)
- Complete integration of our site style and shopping cart by the FastSpring staff. It saved me a lot of work and testing to get it right.
Check them out for yourself, at http://www.fastspring.com
Hacker Evolution (PocketPC) has been nominated for Best Software Award, by PocketPC Magazine
We have been emailed that the PocketPC version of Hacker Evolution has been nominated for the 2008 Best Software Award, under the Games - Real Time Strategy category. The award is a very prestigious one in the mobile software industry, and we are excited to learn that our product has drawn enough attention to be nominated for the award.
More information can be seen here:
http://www.pocketpcmag.com/awards/category_all_2008.asp
And it was …. the GC Leipzig 2008
All I can say, it’s that is was huge, well organized and a lot of fun. Sliding through the business and visitor areas all day long, was fun
I got to met some nice people, check out some new games and technologies and have a lot of fun.
I even got to see Duke Nukem chilling with some ice-cream. I am still patiently waiting for Duke Nukem Forever to come out since about 10 years ago when I first played Duke Nukem. Enjoy some photos below, and see you all next year.
