Few month ago a friend and I decided to start the adventure of making games for a living…almost… we would be dead to be honest if we had no other income…
Our first project is a Tetris like game, called Stack3D, made with JME (ofc) and targeted to android devices.
I’m fairly proud to announce that the game is now released and available on Google Play.
I wanted to make my own game since I was a kid, and that’s the very reason I first came here.
I wanted to be on the user side for once. USE the engine, to make a real game and see how I would manage to do it. You’ll be the judges.
The game is entirely made with JME3, and the GUI is made with nifty. I made all the graphic resources myself (except for the fonts).
It extensively use batching, for the block stack (all is made from one unit block). I used the SimpleBatchNode, as it perfectly suited the needs.
I made my own material and shader for blocks, that uses some kind of per vertex shading and coloring (per pixel shading can kill some android devices).
It uses particles for displaying the next falling blocks, and some effects.
Most of the objects in the background are just impostors with hi res models textures mapped on them (that’s nice to have a static point of view).
Android can be quite challenging, my goal was to make the game run at around at 30 fps on my nexus one. And i did manage to make it.
I plan on adding anti alising though on future release for most recent hardware (the last generation is munching the game no problem).
The game has a quite small scope, and yet it took a long time to get done. Just to say that making a game takes a lot of time, and that correctly scoping it from the beginning is primordial to succeed.
We had to postpone some features to future releases though.
I know i’m quite biased, but the engine is great. And ready to be used in commercial games.
The android part needs a lot of work though, especially on the sound part, but android and Google Play has no par to supply an easy commercial model (except iOS and the AppStore ofc).
I’m sorry for Iphone users that won’t be able to play the game. Maybe some day JME will run on iOS ;).
Also maybe i’ll get the applet version of the app available on the web site in several month.
Seemed nice, only had time for a quick play though. I like the concept of the spinning playing surface, worked well to give a new twist to things.
The main thing I will say is that the level available on the demo was so slow that I got bored and turned it off… and I can’t say it was enough of a taste that it would inspire me to buy the full thing…
Edit to add: Tested on Galaxy S2, everything ran nice and smoothly.
Not compatible with LG-P970 but compatible with LG-P500?
Maybe you need to check permissions. I’ve noticed that particularly the “uses-feature android:glEsVersion” string spoils some availability on the market. I avoid that one in my apps.
Played the demo on my Nexus S, 4.0.4. Everything seemed to be working perfectly, including the “Purchase” option that took me through to Google Play where I could complete my purchase
Congratulations Rémy! You made a friggin’ Android game We ought to put this up on the blog in some form or the other (hope to catch you on the chat some day soon).
Bought the full version. Running great on my Motorola Bionic. Going to load on my Motorola Xoom today. Great job. Thanks for your help with the Android part of the engine.
@Empire Phoenix, well that's really strange, it should work on 2.2, i tested it on an arcos on android 2.2, it was slow, but it was working...
Also a classNotFound in java.util makes me anger at Google....
@zarch, you can make the block fall faster with a longpress, but maybe you're right I should make the demo faster.
Typo: Scroll Sensibility - I think you mean Scroll Sensitivity (in settings menu).
I think it was more the available difficulty levels than anything else...Easy and Normal both seemed reeeeaaallly easy and with only having those two settings available I wasn't able to see if something more challenging was more fun.
@zarch said:
Typo: Scroll Sensibility - I think you mean Scroll Sensitivity (in settings menu).
Ha yes thanks, that's the french touch...
@zarch said:
I think it was more the available difficulty levels than anything else...Easy and Normal both seemed reeeeaaallly easy and with only having those two settings available I wasn't able to see if something more challenging was more fun.
the concept is that you start slow and the block falling speed increase each 10 lines...like plain old tetris.
@zarch said:
I'm not sure I like the jumpy falling either...smooth feels better for me.
That's by choice, I wanted the exact same feeling than Tetris on my game boy when i was 12.
the concept is that you start slow and the block falling speed increase each 10 lines...like plain old tetris.
I don't want to seem too negative - so just wanted to say that overall it seemed very professional. Very slick polished. I'm just trying to give feedback to make it better/more successful.
Are the lines wider than in old tetris? They seem to take a long time to fill as both times I played I got to 3 or 4 lines filled and by that point was bored tbh... Even with the fast drop key. I also spent what seemed an inordinate amount of time waiting for the next block to come onto the screen before I could do anything with it. It might be better if it came on faster to start with or even just use some effects and fade it in already on screen and skip the first 3 or 4 jumps down.
As I said it's most likely a difficulty level thing as virtually any game I play I immediately ramp up to nearly max but here I didn't have the option to do that.
@zarch said:
I don't want to seem too negative - so just wanted to say that overall it seemed very professional. Very slick polished. I'm just trying to give feedback to make it better/more successful.
Really, don't worry, your feedback is much appreciated, and i'll definitely bump up the speed in the demo.
One of the postponed feature is to be able to select the starting speed level (like in....tetris :p). Actually, several people that tested the game weren't able to make a line so I slowed it down a bit.
The demo is here to demonstrate the game really, the real challenge is in the full version. But you're right when you say that the demo has to be challenging too to make people want to buy the game :p
The difficulty level does not affect falling speed, in easy you have a hint ghost block that is displaying where the actual block should fall. This makes the game very easy.
Normal does not have this hint block but the speed is the same.
Expert and Chaos mode will be harder, but I won't spoil what's gonna change. But speed will still be the same.
The lines are wider than most tetris, yes. One line is 16 unit block and usually in most tetris it's 12. Also in most tetris the height is 20 to 24, here it's 16. I tested several settings and this one was the most satisfying, considering the place taken by the tower onscreen.
Yep, 10 lines in normal tetris = 120 blocks, here it’s 160…so to speed up at the same rate you would want it to be 7 completed lines not 10.
I didn’t realise difficulty wasn’t speed, sounds interesting. I think if it had a speed adjustment setting then that would have clued me in that difficulty != speed and by being able to turn the speed up I’d both have more fun and be more interested to see what the other two modes do…
I started a new game and after playing for a while I paused the game (because it was very slow… ;)) and I went back to the main menu.
Then, I start again and the game starts with no blocks on the screen (what it’s good), but after putting the first block, the blocks of the previous game (or something similar…) suddenly appears on the screen (what it seems to be a bug).
The rest of the game seems to work fine.
What about using the accelerometer to move the tower?? It could be a nice feature.
@galvez6000 said:
It works almost fine...
I started a new game and after playing for a while I paused the game (because it was very slow... ;)) and I went back to the main menu.
Then, I start again and the game starts with no blocks on the screen (what it's good), but after putting the first block, the blocks of the previous game (or something similar...) suddenly appears on the screen (what it seems to be a bug).
mhhh that's strange...i'm gonna test that, thank you for your feedback
