Crazyhead Games

Chum

jeremy — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:52:50 +0000

I’ve just started a new game engine for Android called Chum. I’ll be using a lot of code and knowledge from the engine I wrote for CowPotato, as well as from many other resources, so it’s not a from-scratch effort. The main focus on the engine will be:

2D and 3D OpenGL ES
Incorporate best practices for OpenGL setup, touch and accelerometer handling, etc
Simple loading and management of meshes, textures, sounds
Handle much of the boiler-plate stuff like exception handling

It’s not intended to be a super-duper, whiz-bang engine to start with. It will mostly be geared at my needs for some games I have in mind (including fixing lots of problems in CowPotato), and serve as a testbench / prototyping tool. A general game engine will never be able to be as finely tuned as a purpose-built engine for each game, but it should be sufficient for a wide variety of applications, at least as a starting point.

I also plan to make Chum open-source, but I’m not sure how / when that will happen. I’m thinking of some possible business models (to get at least some marginal monetary benefit) such as services / tutorials based on Chum, but I still have a lot to figure out.

Current Android game offerings pretty disappointing

jeremy — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:36:02 +0000

I spent a hour or so yesterday browsing the Android Market, specifically looking for games for my three-year-old to play. His first question about every game: “how do I shoot.” I really don’t see many good options among current offerings.

I’m still working on CowPotato, and one thing I plan to add is a ‘toddler’ mode with simplified aiming — the current controls are a bit beyond my son. But even if I’m looking for more advanced games, there are few action games to choose from. That is, if you don’t include all the emulator games and XGalaga clones. Come on, people! How about putting some effort into something slightly original?

I’ve got a couple other projects going, but it’s painfully slow, trying to make time to work on them. Android may not be even close to as good as an (action) gaming platform as the iPhone, but there’s still a lot of untapped potential, and I’m still excited about going after that. I’ll be blogging a bit more about my upcoming projects shortly…

First Android game: CowPotato

jeremy — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:39:26 +0000

I developed CowPotato along with the guys from Froogloid, over the summer of 2009. We targeted it from the beginning for submitting to the Android Developer Challenge 2, but we’ll continue to support and improve it in the normal Android Market as well.

CowPotato was released to the Market in beta form on Aug 24, and submitted to ADC2 Aug 31. We hope to have a non-beta release ready to go by Oct 1, and a enhanced pro version soon after that.

As part of creating CowPotato, I developed a 3D game engine that I plan to polish and reuse for more games in the future. My eventual goal is to make that engine public (most likely as an open-source project) for others to use, but it needs the experience of a few more games before I’m ready to do that. I will be writing future posts about game deevelopment issues here, so I hope to see you back soon.