Jfgeyelin's dev blog

Today, while doing my daily googling of PewPew-related news, I found a piano version of PewPew's main theme! I hope an a capella version is coming.

At one point during the development of PewPew, I wanted the players to be able to enter their name for the online high scores and replays. At first I started to use the native iOS keyboard,  and for a couple of months that's all there was. But because I always wanted to have as few OS-specific code as possible to make the porting to different OS as simple as possible, I decided to implement my own keyboard. It was going to be a lot of boring work though, so I kept postponing for later... And then, one day, I got in  I saw this: Extract from Gunnm , a fantastic manga. I immediately wanted to have this keyboard in PewPew, and two days later it was done. And it looked great: custom keyboard = seamless integration. Besides the speed gain when porting to a new platform and the code simplification, there are many other advantages to having a custom keyboard. PewPew's font does not contain all the characters, so I can show only the characters that...

Quick post to say that I released an update for both PewPew and PewPew 2, that includes a new game mode called Asteroids . It's of course an homage to the classic 1979 game , albeit PewPew style: lots of shooting, and lots of enemies. A few notes: To keep the retro mood going on, the ship's color is forced to white. The asteroids' shape is generated at run time: it was faster for me to write code than to draw manually them :-) Added bonus: they have a unique shape every time. Final note: I resisted the urge of making the asteroids rotate, to stay closer to the original. A game developer's life is tough.

I was until very recently doing an internship in Singapore. I got to visit southeast asia, and while in Bangkok I saw this advertisement in the metro: It made my day :)

While it's true that Android's openness cause fragmentation which increases the work of the developers, it also allows the creation of new markets and opportunities. The XPeria PLAY by Sony Ericsson is one of those opportunities, and allows mobile game developers frustrated by the touch screen to have fun ;-) As you can see, it has buttons, but most importantly for me, it has two touch-joysticks (I just invented that term, and now that I think about it, it doesn't mean anything). I recently released a version of PewPew 2 optimized for the XPeria PLAY, and will be doing the same for PewPew 1 soon. Sony Ericsson has been really awesome with the whole thing. After exchanging a few emails they rapidly sent an XPeria PLAY simply after I promised I would bring PewPew to their phone. No stupid contracts or anything, they just trusted me. Really cool. Now the phone itself is fantastic and feels really solid, and the joysticks are surprisingly usable...

When reading other's developers blog, I always appreciate reading the posts about the number of downloads. It is always useful to know how many downloads to expect, and what impact different events can have. The mobile landscape is changing fast though, and while you can get a pretty good idea of the dynamics of the Apple Appstore,  there's not a lot of information regarding the Android Market ( AM ) and the new Amazon Appstore ( AA ). Here's my humble contribution (please note that all the numbers given are approximations). PP on Android Market During the first two weeks, PP was getting 800 downloads per day. However it got featured by Google, and the downloads increased a hundred folds (it got up to 80k downloads on one day). During the one or two weeks it was featured, it got about 900k downloads and entered the most downloaded free app list. I am guessing that currently, every free app in the top 10 are getting at least 40k downloads per day. Ri...

Here's an  interview I gave for droidgamers.com. Among other things, I talk about which games influenced PewPew, what it's like developing for Android, what impact does getting featured on the Android Market has, and what I think about ad-supported applications.

One day has passed, and PewPew is doing well. It has entered the Hot android app category on AppBrain.com, and I am receiving a lot of positive feedback. While monitoring twitter I found 14n3 saying "Oh man, making a review of PewPew, this game rocks!". Always gratifying. Unfortunately, there are a few people reporting crashes. Since PewPew is very stable on the iOS devices, the crashes must stem from Android specific code I added. There are two areas where I am not sure I am doing everything right: It's either the handling of the application life cycle, specifically the part where I have to reload the openGL data when the game is resumed, or the http requests to upload and download the scores and replays. Those thing would pose no problem if PewPew was a Java application like most Android applications, but it is 99% a C++ app with a thin Java wrapper (and thus uses JNI). To reduce the amount of JNI code I cut some corners. At first I started using the Android Java API...

The title pretty much says it all. I uploaded PewPew to the market today, and it is now spreading across the internet. Here's the link to download it for Android. From what I've seen, PewPew is by far the best shooter on the Android Market. On my Nexus One, I'd say it runs at approximately 4 time the frame rate of the current most popular shooter, Gun Bros . BTW, Gun Bros is an absolute piece of crap, gameplay and UI wise. It's sickening to see the work of good artists go to waste with game designers like that. Sorry for the rant, but some games just revolt me! Now go play PewPew on Android and fill the empty leaderboards :)