I’ve been meaning to write this one for a couple of months now, but never really found the time and actually got around to do it. So here goes. I started noticing a lot of games on the Android Market with familiar looking icons, and after closer inspection, it’s clear that most of the graphics have been stolen from Jewels. I have not downloaded the games, but I would hazard a guess that the sounds are also taken from Jewels for most of these clones.

Do a quick search for “Jewels” on the Android Market. What do you find? I counted 8 (that’s right, eight!) games that have graphics stolen from my game. Six (6) of those eight games have one of my Jewels graphics as icon image. One clone is the worst offender. It has stolen the graphics, the icon (yes, the actual Jewels-icon a couple of versions back) and get this… even the freaking app description is copied from my game! The best part — and the gist of this entire posting — the game is named Jewels.

Now let’s be realistic: “jewels” is a common word. (All those eight games have the word in their title; most probably there other clones with stolen assets with other names.) It’s not like I invented the word. But why on Earth does Android Market allow two apps (two games, both in the Casual-category) to share the exactly same name? Why? Especially when the copycat app clearly has stolen almost everything from the original app. I mean what the hell? Why couldn’t they check for the app name and prevent duplicate named apps from the Market? I can see them allowing same named apps for different categories, but I don’t understand the current policy at all. (Perhaps that other Jewels has some whitespace characters in its name, I don’t know, but frankly I see no reason why names like “Jewels_“, where _ is a space, should be allowed.)

The Market is also riddled with app spammers, developers (in the lowest possible meaning of the word) that pump out dozens of sub-standard apps and spam them in with different developer accounts. This is of course a whole different issue, and one that doesn’t really matter to me, but it lowers the quality of the marketplace on the whole. I feel that Google should do some cleaning up on the Market, get rid of all the crap — and of the spammed apps using stolen assets (the most obvious cases, at least).

All this “steal assets from a popular game, and name it similarly” is of course to get a share of the attention those popular games receive. I guess I should be flattered that people bother to steal those graphics? Nevertheless, I’m sure that more popular apps have it worse than I do: look at all those wanna-be Angry Birds -games on the Market. Just sad…

***

As you can see, I’m not thrilled with the Android Market as it is now, and I shall carefully consider whether to bring my future games to the platform at all. Apple has things far better on the App Store; the control is much tighter, but at least it keeps some of the crap out. And they don’t allow two apps with the same name, something that became clear to me with iJewels. Not to mention I’ve come to like the iOS-platform much more than Android, but that’s a different story..

This stealing assets thing is also one of the reasons why I still haven’t (and never will, it seems) added the music from iJewels to the Android-Jewels. It would be stolen the instant I hit the big ol’ Publish-button on the Market.

General (Jewels and iJewels)

• Problem: I used to get really high scores and now I cannot get them! Or: the latest update broke the game, cannot get high scores any more!
  Solution: I have not touched the game mechanics / rules except when adjusting the Timed mode. Not once. What explains these complaints then? Well, the game is based on (pseudo) randomness, so it’s just a case of plain back luck(tm). Simple as that.
  Short answer: Bad luck, try again.
• Problem: I don’t want to submit scores, how can I disable the score submission?
  Solution: You can disable the score submission by going to the Profile-page from the main menu.
• Problem: I want to submit scores but don’t want to register to Scoreloop!
  Solution: You don’t have to register in order to submit scores. You only have to accept their terms, and a generated player name is assigned to you. You can change that name from the Profile-page. You don’t have to provide an email address, it is optional.
  Short answer: You don’t have to register.

On iJewels (iPhone, iPod touch, iPad)

• Problem: The game stays waiting for download / update, i.e. the icon is grey and there is “Waiting…” below it. What do I do?
  Solution: This is not related to iJewels but iOS, as I have seen this on other apps even before the first iJewels was released. The apps seem to download normally, but are still left in pending state. In any case, restarting the phone has always corrected this problem for me.
  Short answer: Restart your phone.
• Problem: The game freezes or crashes!
  Partial solution: No permanent solution right now. Restarting the game (by killing it first from the task list) should help. I have been unable to reproduce any crashes or freezes, apart from score submission related “freezes” that have been solved already in the game updates. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to fix something that cannot be reproduced reliably. Check out the question below, if that’s what you mean instead.
• Problem: Switching away from the game and later resuming the game sometimes leaves you with black or white screen.
  Solution: The framebuffer doesn’t get recreated properly for reasons unknown. This happens occasionally, and in my testing it seems that going away from the game and returning once again fixes the problem. I.e. press Home-key and then get back to the game. Killing the game from the task list (hold down Home-key) and restarting should also fix this.
  Short answer: Try pressing the Home-key and then returning to the game again. Or kill the game from the task list and restart it.

On Jewels (Android)

• Problem: Android Market force closes / crashes while downloading or updating Jewels. The game cannot be uninstalled either.
  Solution: This is a bug with the Market. Clearing the Market cache should resolve the situation. Go to Settings -> Applications -> Manage Applications -> Market and clear the cache.
  Short answer: Clear the Market cache, see above for details.
• Problem: Why does the game need access to my phone calls and/or access the internet?
  Solution: The Phone State-permission has nothing to do with phone calls, instead it is needed to get the device ID, which is required to use Scoreloop (as the SL profile is tied to one physical device). Internet access is naturally for the global scores, and also for the ads. The does work fine without a connection, though.
  
• Problem: I keep getting notifications from the game that an update is available.
  Solution: Update to the latest version from the Android Market. The update checker has been disabled for several versions now, so you must be running a quite old version of the game.

I’m proud to say that my own top score for the Normal playmode is currently on the quite respectable ranking of 70141.. I did a bit better in the Timed game, ranking at 8167 at the moment. So yeah, there are some good scores about. On the Finland list I’m at rankings 41 and 11 respectively, yay!

I also completely redid the old and ugly Android-menus for something that works (and looks) a bit better, plus made some long overdue fixes here and there, but I guess I should’ve blogged about the release earlier; these other changes are not that interesting..

Also, this seems like a good opportunity to announce that there probably won’t be any bigger updates for Jewels later, I will do some bug fixes and like but nothing major, I think. I need to focus on other things, and due to a rather big personal event (of which I’ll post about a bit later) I need to priorize my time better. Nevertheless, I want to thank all the players, especially those numerous people that play the game regularly and keep it prospering on the Android Market! So thank you!

So it’s been a blast, I still cannot understand why it’s been so successfull. Ok, mostly because it’s Bejeweled, but there are loads of other B-clones on the Android Market, so that doesn’t explain it entirely. I guess there just was a (big) niche for a free & polished B-game.

Although some people have complained about the addition of ads — which are only in the main menu and not some distracting blinking colorful banners either, I need to clarify — turned out it really was the best thing to do. I’m not allowed to share any numbers, but it’s been waaay over my lowly expectations..

I’d like to express my gratitude and thanks to all those numerous active players, and of course to the good folk at Google AdSense for making this possible! I had never anticipated it, but turned out that ad supported apps and games are indeed a viable business model.

…and still it’s only the second most popular free game on the Market; I cannot beat that bloody Solitaire for the life of me!

You see, all this is my fault, unfortunately. I did an update checker in the Android-version of Jewels, that contacts the server to see if an update has been published. I had not anticipated the success the game would get, and made it simply to check for updates every time the game is started. This was a huge mistake, in retrospect. I don’t know why I didn’t realise the potential problem of checking for updates too often.. My website account was closed because of too much traffic to the version check script. So that’s why this site was down for several days.

I’ve deleted the script, released new versions of Jewels that contact to a static HTML-file (previously the script was PHP, which in turn increased the stress on the server) and — importantly — not every time the game is started. Still, looking at the access logs on the new server, things look unnerving. Many people have not updated the game, and thus there is loads of requests for the (now deleted) old update check script. I might need to take out the update checking altogether, then again most of the people won’t probably update to that version so…

Let’s hope that more people update to the latest Jewels and this huge rush of requests starts to calm down. Otherwise I’m looking at my account suspended, again.

I’ll write something about the porting experience from programmers point of view later; it definitely has been interesting as I have not done any mobile coding before this.

UPDATE on 13th of November:

Now that Jewels has been on the Market for a week, I’d like to share some statistics with you. Turned out that the game is a huge success (ok, it’s mainly because it’s Bewejeled, but interesting still), I had not anticipated this at all! At first I thought it’d break 5000 downloads before the last weekend (the game was released on Thursday). It did, Sunday the downloads were over 16 000. On Monday, it was over 32 000. And now, it’s over 100 000 installs, 92% of them active (i.e. still on users’ phones)!

Jewels is actually the second most popular (free) game in the Market right now with a average rating of 4.5 stars (596 ratings at the moment), only behind a Solitaire-game. Very nice. I’ve actually gotten more comments about Android-Jewels in a week, than I have from all my previous games combined during all these years, wow! So there’s definately market for good Android-games. I’m planning to make something a bit more original next,  so stay tuned.

Of course, it’s not all roses: I’ve released about a dozen updates but still there remains some mysterious bugs that don’t occur in most of the phones, but do in some.. Partly that is because Jewels was not originally writting  for phones (XNA as an environment is way simpler than Android!), and partly because I’ve probably screwed up something (my first Android app, after all). I will definitely try to design the next game to more solid and not so prone to these various bugs and crashes. But one thing bugs me: the Anroid phones are truly different from each other, although in theory the same code should work in most of them, in reality it won’t.. I’ve seeing reports of some really weird crashes that really should not be happening.

Hi, everybody! (“Hi, doctor Nick!” …sorry.)

Little background on today’s topic: When I first heard of the Google Android-platform some years back, I thought it was interesting but never actually expected to see proper devices (i.e. mobile phones) coming to reality. Now that there is several Android phones from a few manufacturers, I’ve been eyeing out the devices with great interest for a while now, I guess closer to a year actually. Waiting for them to arrive here in Finland. And, as you might have guessed already, they have arrived.

The Hero emerges..

So, I got myself a brand new HTC Hero! Obviously, the main interest for me was the prospect of developing software (ok, games) for the Android-platform. Also, it’s darn good phone as well, who would have thought of it? My previous phone was a few years old Nokia, just a basic model with no bells and/or whistles — so this is all new to me.

Why not iPhone, then? Well, there are several reasons I went with Android:

1. The development environment. It’s free, cross-platform and well integrated into Eclipse. Plus I get to write in Java, which I very much prefer over Objective-C.
2. I don’t need a freaking Mac for developing (as if the phone wasn’t expensive enough..)! I can use my old, cruddy PC instead. 
3. Android Market, while still in its early stages, has great potential. Plus not nearly as much competition as in the iPhones App Store (obviously this also means less customers, but things improve when Android-phones gain more market, I hope).

Developing for Android

What this all means, is that I will be making some Android-games in the future. To get myself familiar with the new platform, I chose to port Jewels over to Android. It’s still in very early stages, as I really started working on it only yesterday. It remains to be seen if the standard software accelerated 2d Canvas API is fast enough for my purposes (should be for Jewels), or if I have to go over the OpenGL ES route. If / when I get it completed, I plan on making it available through the Android Market, for free. Actually, at this time it is not even possible to submit paid apps to the Market from Finland, nor it is possible to purchase apps. Hopefully Finland gets the full Market support in the coming months.

After Jewels, anybody up for Steroids³? Just wondering.