The video below shows the game I’ve been working on my spare time with a friend. The working title is Amoeba, and it is being developed with Spellbook running over Marmalade.
Progress has been nice and steady, considering I’ve worked a total of 4 or 5 hours on it, not counting the basic porting time for Spellbook.
We deliberately chose a simple game to develop, since we wanted to tackle loads of stuff at the same time (developing for mobiles, distribution, marketing, etc) and we didn’t want to have to worry about the game development as well…
As it is, the game is about using your finger to “grab” unicellular organisms of the same color. If you collect enough, you’ll get a “Breakthrough” that allows you to advance to the next level. If you grab an organism of a different color of the one you’re currently grabbing, they’ll nullify each other and the risk of “Infection” is greater.
Not groundbreaking, but I’m hoping to achieve other objectives than perfect game design with this one:
- Finish a game for mobile devices
- Getting it into the market
- Marketing it
Some challenges so far were to adjust the game to different device orientations and to different aspect ratios, both of which are already up and running…
Next steps include some basic GUI work and level progression… After that, level design and sound, and finally polish and menu stuff…
The video above is running in the ARM emulator that comes with Marmalade, but the game runs exactly the same in my Samsung Galaxy S (an Android phone).