Just wanted to announce that I’ve finished the Android port of Jewels. It is now available through the Android Market, for free. The comments so far have been very positive, thank you. I’ll probably release an update later with some fixes and tweaks, but after that I think it’s time to start thinking [...]

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 [...]

Time for an update, I reckon.
Although PolyAnim is generally on hold due to the game project, I made a few optimizations (reducing garbage generation mostly, still quite high though) to it. As for the game, I’m still working on the engine side — BUT — I’ve written down some things on the game plot and [...]

Today’s subject: quad trees. Here is a nice little tutorial on the subject.
Until now I was using a naive method of rendering the level shapes (polygons and circles): I looped through them all, did a bounding box check* to see if they’re visible in camera, and rendered if they were. This works fine for small [...]

Once again, I’ve been improving the platformer engine. I have done a lot of internal restructuring which isn’t directly visible on the screen. Remember, this project started as a quick hack testing JBox2D, so the oldest parts of the code were a total mess. Cleaning it up, I implemented modules, that the engine keeps processing. [...]