My New Game Released!

It has been a while since my last blog post, but I am happy to announce the release of my new game for the Playbook and Blackberry 10! The game was created as part of the Marmalade SDK promo announced back in October, and a recent upgrade to Marmalade 6.2 has also enabled porting to Blackberry 10. Therefore I took advantage of the recent Marmalade BB10 port-a-thon over the past weekend as well.

Although the game is available for download in the app store, I have more features to add in the upcoming weeks and months. One of the first features I wish to add is the ability to have the levels locked at the beginning and unlock as you progress through the levels. The game will save your score for each level, so that when you load up the app to play each time it remembers your progress and allows you to improve your scores. That will involve learning to do some basic file read/writes. All that has to be done is to write and load an array that keeps track of the scores on each level.

For example, the array could be score[gamelevel] which is originally set to 0's indicating the level is locked. As you complete levels, you save the score as either 1, 2 or 3 indicating the score achieved. If you do not finish the level at all, it will remain 0. Therefore, it is easy to see the last level achieved just by scanning through the array increasing in gamelevel until you reach the first "0" level. The array will write and load at each level achievement, and at the beginning of the game when it loads. Also, the icons on the game level selection screen will have to display either a lock, 1, 2 or 3 stars on each level depending on the score. This will basically read through the array and show a lock for all uncompleted levels and scores on levels that have been done.

The next major feature that needs to be added is sound. There will need to be sound effects which indicate whenever balls get launched or hit obstacles and the particle, as well as some background music which will run in a continuous loop. There can be several different background music tracks depending on the level. A button will have to be added on the main screen to allow music and sound-effects to be toggled on and off.

Finally, once those basic features are added, new levels and also new types of balls and obstacles will be created. Ideas include worm-hole like regions which allow balls to teleport, special types of balls that split or do other actions when the screen is tapped, regions that accelerate or decelerate balls, different kinds of walls and objects (for example circular walls instead of just rectangles) and so on. There are so many possible permutations, the combinations are staggering and many levels are possible.

So there you have it, my first Blackberry game ever, made with Marmalade SDK and so now I have my project planned out for the next year, to slowly and steadily improve Quantum Colliders and make it a cool new physics game for the Playbook and Blackberry 10 phone!