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My FishJam and Gideros experiences
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29-05-2013 2:32pm#1So I made my first (very simple and rather unpolished) android game for the 7 day fishing jam. The game is a one screen game using a frogger like mechanic where fish move from one side to the other and you move your hook around. The first fish you touch you catch and the the deeper you go the better fish you can catch. The big mechanic is that as time goes on the cost of bait increases and as the fish return a set amount of coins some become not worth catching.
Im not sure if its fun as replaying your game over and over tends to blur the line
but my goal was more about a learning experience.
A screenshot:
The apk: Link.
Yes I know I can't draw!
More to the point, aside from playing around with a short tutorial, it was my first time using Gideros or lua. Lua is very simple to use once you pick up the basics but the amount of times I wrote self.addchild() rather than self:addchild() or left out a self. before some variables. I found it a bit scary not declaring variables coming from c++ and c#. I guess those who have made flash games would find it easier to pick up straight away.
Gideros is fantastic (so far) and there are some great tutorial sites like appcodingeasy.com. It can use Box2d but I try and avoid physics engines when I can. The online community and in particular one member of the gideros team seems to be very helpful (although I never needed to post for help I did have to search for some topics).
The gideros player for windows or android is the big plus. You can make a change to a variable and literally be playing the revised game 2 seconds later. I can see that being a big plus for iteration and apparently using the free Zerobrdge IDE you can actually have a live version of the game running on your device and edit the variables in play, similar to Unity on desktops.
Where it is a bit of a let down is when it comes to exporting the game. You need to load the exported file into eclipse, making sure you are up to date on android versions and it fills the manifest with permissions you might not need and in app billing code. Shame gideros doesn't offer a list of options when exporting.
Still I'm in no rush to brush up on my java and android architecture!2
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