Last week, or maybe early this week a friend linked the google AI challenge. This re-energized my programming curiosity in a way that meshed well with the fact that my wife recently purchased a Droid 2. So I’ve been playing around with Elcipse, Java and the Android SDK for the last week or so. Eclipse is a bit of a beast, but I knew that going in. This is the first time I’ve given the Android platform any attention, and I’m glad I did.

So back to the AI Challenge… that lead me to Phil Hassey’s blog… which lead me to this Ludum Dare challenge. It’s simple really. Make a game, take it to market and sell a copy. Do it by the end of October. I’ve always been interested in what it would take to break out of the daily grind of business app development and try out some game dev. I’m certainly out of my general comfort zone. On the other hand, code is code.

So I’m going to hold myself to the challenge. Hopefully making a publicly accessible spectacle out of it will keep me on task for fear of shame and humiliation if I don’t finish. I kind of like the idea of blogging about the process, since I’ll basically be starting from zero practical experience with game development. Hopefully it’ll be informative and help me organize some ideas. I’m sure the game won’t have a lot of commercial viability, but it should be a good place to get my feet wet and have some fun.

I started tonight with a bit of general design and planning. I’ve got an idea, it’s going to be a game targeted towards younger kids. Not so much Baby Smash young… about the age where they ask you to play with your phone while you’re driving. It will be a 2D side scroller type game. That should keep the graphics intensity minimal. I’m pretty worried about the graphics aspect of this project because I’m not much of an artist.

Despite being mostly comfortable in a Microsoft stack (and partly because of it) I’ve decided to target Android phones. To start with, while I’ve not really done any appreciable Java development or extensive work with Eclipse, it’s not too large a departure from what I’m use to. iPhone is out because I’m just not as comfortable in the XCode/Objective-C paradigm. Given the timeframe, that’s a lot to grep. Additionally, I really don’t feel like shelling out $99 to get my foot in the door at the app store. I wouldn’t really expect to make it back.

Here’s my current list of technical hurdles:

• Need to brush up on Java and Eclipse. The Android developer site has been pretty helpful so far. With my C# background I’m not too worried about Java.
• What’s the best way to draw this type of app? From my reading so far it looks like drawing to a Canvas.

• Going to need a lot more familiarity with the Android SDK. Specifically

  • 2d drawing/animation
  • audio libraries
  • general ui and touch event handling
    Lots of reading to do over the next couple days. Best get to it.