• Implement global highscore submission [DONE]
• Implement global highscore leaderboards [DONE]
• Enable the tennis ball to continue flight up into the sky (fixes glitch which let players get constant ball rebounds off the top of the screen, also adds challenge) [DONE]
• Add multiple tennis balls for multiple difficulty levels [TO-DO]
• Pause button [TO-DO]
• Add a scoring bounce region to the racket [TO-DO]
• App sharing capabilities [TO-DO]
• Captive runtime [TO-DO]
• Add more sounds [TO-DO]
• Native device vibration [MAYBE]

Leaderboards

This post will be updated as changes are made

I’ll get back to games and apps soon, I promise

Meanwhile I’m still waiting for Guess the Quote to catch on.

Just comment when you’re ready!

The design is oh so clean and inviting, while navigation is smooth yet swift. You could say that Google has taken the best features of Facebook and Twitter, enhanced them for the better, and served them on a shiny, white plate.

Privacy has been a focus for the team, and focused they have. The “circles” system is solid, in which you effectively group your contacts and arrange them as you like. This enables you to choose with whom you share posts etc with. This feature is streamlined yet powerful.

“Hangouts”, which are like video chats, sound like a very cool idea, which I have yet to experiment with. My only gripe is the games section of the website. While still in its early days, some of the games often take a long time to initialized, presenting the user with a plain, black box.

Overall, I think Google is onto something extraordinary, and I can’t wait to see where their project goes.

Follow me on G+

Flash Builder 4.6 splash screen

One could say that Adobe’s massive jump into mobile support across various applications (Dreamweaver, Flash) was a necessary one due to the steady, oceanic flow of users using there mobiles and smartphones for an increasing number of functions everyday. This mobile “uprising” has seen the downfall of the beloved AS3 game engine, The PushButton Engine. A special notice on the PushButton Labs website explains how “Mobile has become the centre of the universe, and social games are starting to struggle”.

I’ve released one app on the Android Market, which was a rushed test app (he says), and so I’ve got some experience of the publishing process. Articles and tutorials suggest a more daunting publishing process for sending apps over to the Apple AppStore, but more on that when I actually get round to submitting something to it.

Brief views:

The Good

• Those with knowledge of AS3 and MXML can easily build mobile applications which can be deployed to Android, iOS, and Blackberry phones, and more recently, tablets.
• Design the app’s layout quickly and easily with skin-able components.
• Code the functionality you love with the Flex framework (now open-source).
• Native extensions.

The Bad

• Flash Builder and Flex 4.6 is still a new player in the mobile game, and so naturally there are limitations to the code’s interaction with native mobile functions.
• Relies on the user installing Adobe Air on their mobile device, although the new captive runtime feature allows for this to be looked over, but can add a hefty 8MB or so on top of the app’s size.
• Performance still needs to be greatly improved, as a lot of optimisation needs to be done on the apps at the moment.
• Loooong load up/initialisation time for apps.

So, in this early review(?) of Flash/Flex-app-building, I can conclude that an exciting future of mobile development awaits, but that future has a while still in development.

It’s true, Gravity Ninja has finally been released!

Go play the game on the sponsor site until its on this one, or visit the game page for some more details.

NOTE: On the sponsor site the highscores don’t sort themselves out in descending order. Remember, the shorter the time you score, the better!

I’ll try and get round to doing some kind of post-mortem blog post, but until then, enjoy the game!

-Zuhair

I’ve been working on Codeblock, a physics-based puzzle game, something I wanted to be a short project. It’s still in very early stages – it’s not easy making a challenging game. And a challenging game it must be if it will probably have only 10 levels, those 10 levels must impress.

I learnt a lot from making Gravity Ninja, and am applying what I’ve learnt to this game. Check out a screenshot of the first level:

The objective is to deliver the Code block to the Finish block (names still in development + Finish block not shown in screenshot), by altering the surrounding environment. The latter can be done by colliding different Blocks, positioning them, and doing so with timing and precision.

More to come as development continues.

While Gravity Ninja is still in its final-final publishing stages, I have a new game in the works. For now I’ll refer to it as “Wingless Fairies” until I have a working game engine, which should be fairly soon.

Sneak Peak Details:

• Genre: Puzzle
• Colour Scheme: Greens & Browns
• Levels: Minimum 10
• Official Game Announcement: Within 1 week