Boardtastic Skateboarding

User Code & Projects
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Hi, I’m one of the developers on Boardtastic Skateboarding, and just wanted to mention that we’re using jMonkey engine. Thanks for helping us make it!

If you have an Android phone, please check it out :slight_smile:

Boardtastic Skateboarding on Google Play

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oh!! great, looks very good!
Also you won’t get away with this…now Erlend is gonna stalk you for an interview :wink: !

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Fantastic! Really well done!

EDIT: Failed to mention… this works great on the ASUS Eee Transformer tablet. Not sure if this info is helpful or not /shrug

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oh wow, 500,000 - 1,000,000 downloads, very nice!!!

I remember someone posting about an artifact issue with a game that looked similar to yours, maybe it was one your other developers? :stuck_out_tongue: I guess you fixed it

Now for some general questions (before Erlend gets to you)

  1. How did you find making a game for android with jME? what were the biggest hurdles you faced, that could maybe be improved in the engine.
  2. Your UI looks really good, did you use nifty?
  3. Did you use any lighting?
  4. Did you have any issues with certain devices not working?

Probs to you, this is probably one of the most successful games made with jME in terms of downloads

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Wow, that is mighty impressive! That’s honestly one of the best looking 3D Android games I’ve ever seen. How long has it been out?

You guys should definitely do a case study / post mortem post for our blog here. PM me if you’re interested.

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Believe it or not, I was also on the team developing this game.
Thank you so much JMonkeyEngine team and community for all your help! :wink:

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@SomethingNew said: Believe it or not, I was also on the team developing this game. Thank you so much JMonkeyEngine team and community for all your help! :wink:
Dude.....! :D
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Thanks! Version 2 of the game has been out for less than a month. We also used jME for version 1, which had simpler skating controls, and was released a few months ago.

To answer the general questions:

  1. How did you find making a game for android with jME? what were the biggest hurdles you faced, that could maybe be improved in the engine.

In general, working with jME has been a positive experience :slight_smile: When we first started working on the game, jME beta 3 was the version available - so that’s actually the version the game is still running. We made several custom modifications to deal with some of the challenges we encountered along the way.

Challenges:

  • Making a fast, responsive UI that used minimal memory
  • Android memory limits in general
  • The BitmapText class has several issues on Android

We made several other improvements to JME: (that possibly could be added to the current version)

  • Hardware skinning
  • ECT compressed texture loading
  • Antialiasing on supported phones
  1. Your UI looks really good, did you use nifty?

Nope, we have our own custom UI engine that is built on top of Quads, Nodes, BitmapText, etc.

  1. Did you use any lighting?

There is not any actual lighting in the game, because of the large performance impact when we tested it. All the lighting is baked in to the textures themselves.

  1. Did you have any issues with certain devices not working?

Yes, there are actually about 30 devices we have disabled. Some of them do not having enough memory or graphics memory for what we want to do, some of them have shader errors. Almost all of the devices are older, low-spec android phones.

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awesome, thanks for the detailed explanations! I know that the lighting system is currently being worked on right now. You may be able to have it in Boardtastic 4 ;)!

Concerning the Hardware skinning code, I think we are definitely interested!! :slight_smile:

as per:

http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/forum/topic/mostly-complete-patch-hardwaregpuvertex-skinning-aka-matrix-palette-blending-for-jme/

@SomethingNew said: We've used that hardware skinning code for our purposes on Android and saw 2x-3x improvement in framerate performance across several devices. We are rendering a full scene of static geometries all with shaders, and two objects animated with hardware skinning shaders. I highly recommend using it.
@nehon said: oh really? That's good news thanks for the feedback! Sometime I love to be wrong.

@Momoko_Fan…now is the time to get this into core.

Not sure if anything has been done towards the subject though.

Hopefully the crummy devices will be extinct soon enough :), seems you are compatible with a large number of devices (which is good for the rest of us!!) :stuck_out_tongue:

Keep up the good work. Mentioning jMonkeyEngine somewhere whether in credits/description I’m sure would be appreciated to the core devs :), cheers again

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@wezrule said: Not sure if anything has been done towards the subject though.
I'm on it, i was waiting for shader nodes to integrate this patch.
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I didn’t realize how good the graphics could look on Android. Makes me want to Try Android development again. Excellent job @ericnon.

Can you give us more stats. If its trade secrets no worries
How many people worked on this.
What OS did you use for development
What was your art pipeline like.
What software did you create the models in.
How did you animated them. By Hand, Motion Capture…
Where did you get your textures and art from.

What was your development pipeline like
What OS did you use for development
Did you use the JMonkey SDK , Eclipse
How did you do your builds
Do you test on PC then upload to tablet

The game is awesome, but how did you get so many download in a month… Just word of mouth, promotion?

What did you use for server side code and service

I wish your company much success. Keep up the good work.

-Greg

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@ericnon said: We made several other improvements to JME: (that possibly could be added to the current version) - Antialiasing on supported phones
I'm also very interested in that. Any chance you contribute it back?
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Hey Everyone,

I’m Justin, the project manager for the Boardtastic project. Keep the questions coming, we will try to answer as many as we can. We also try to get a good chuck of our contributions to you guys. We are very excited about what kind of 3D stuff can be made on android with jmonkey! Thanks for all of your work that made our project possible!

Justin

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Hey there.

I’m Justin (not to be confused with project manager, Justin). I am the 3D artist who worked on Boardtastic. To answer some of the questions already asked…

  • Everything was created in Autodesk Maya 2013.
  • All animation was done by me, by hand.
  • Textures were made by a team of myself and two other artists.

Thanks for the kind words regarding the game! :slight_smile:

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I’ve started a topic about Android antialiasing, for those that are interested.

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Wow, so many questions. Monkeys, how about you ask all the questions you’d like in here, and I’ll take them all into account when I “officially” interview them some day very soon?

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So I’ll be interviewing the Boardtastic developers by mail. I took the questions asked in here so far into account. I’m gonna try something new here. I’m making my latest draft public, so anyone can add questions of their own or comment on the existing ones.

I’ll finalize the doc and send it off by the end of today, i.e. a little under 12 hours from now.

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This is great motivational material. I’m glad the game is doing great!

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How big was the entire team, and how experienced were they at game development at the start of the project?

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Thanks for the addition @andrew.glassman . I finalized the interview and sent it to them. Expect to see it up in about 24 hours.