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.