My new App

I have released a new android game called TetraGomy. It's kinda like tetris, but there are two sides to the playing field. Pieces on the top fall down and pieces on the bottom rise up. Once you've completed a line or group of lines on both sides, they fold into the middle. Please download and tell me what you think of it. Thanks!

https://www.nextpit.com/en/android/market/apps/app/xdebugx.tetraGomyA/TetraGomy-Free

You can use the touch screen aswell. And if your phone has them the navigation arrows. I'll work on the trackball and see if I can make it better. Was also thinking of putting onscreen arrow, rotate and drop buttons.

Douglas, I' rewrote the trackball controls. Now It takes multiple samples of the trackball movement and averages them. It should be more accurate. Also under keys in the main menu, you can set the touch and trackball sensitivity. A higher sensitivity will take more samples before it moves the piece, but will make the controls a bit sluggish. A lower sensitivity will move it faster, but may be less accurate. Try adjusting the sensitivity and let me know what you think of these controls. Thanks,

Jeremiah

Remco, if you press keys on the main menu, there is an option to reverse the rotate and drop keys for the bottom half. Maybe I should have this turned on by default? Pressing the trackball will use your spacefold. The spacefold will let you move one of the falling pieces to the opposite side. You are able to use it whenever you have completed a line. It is useful if you don't have a good spot for the current piece or if you need it on the other side to complete a line.

— modified on Jun 16, 2010, 2:19:09 AM

The space fold button is active whenever you have made a line or group lines, it will turn yellow, then you can press it and it will switch the piece to the opposite side. After you have used it once, you must complete another line before you can use it again. I've had several requests for a button to drop immediately, I'll try to get that added in soon. Has your gf tried it yet?

Yes, the speed increases with each level. It gets very fast at about lvl 10. The amount of point you get for each line also goes up per lvl. And you get more points for completing a group of lines. For instance if you fold 4 lines at once you get a lot more than if you fold 4 lines individually.

Which phone do you have Douglas? It is suppose to be saving your preferences as well as the highscore list. Is the highscore list being saved? What about your sound preferences, if you restart the game is sound on or off like you left it? If you move the touch and trackball sensitivity slider to the right it should move a little sluggish but should be more accurate if you move it to the left it should move faster but be less accurate. Did you try moving it to the extreme left or right?

I have released an update TetraGomy. It has some new graphics and I implemented your suggestion to allow the trackball to be pressed to drop the piece all the way. Also if you phone has a keyboard, you can set a key to use to drop the piece under controls. Please tell me what you think of this version. Thanks!

Thanks! I'll put labels in with the next update. Just asking, why would you use only one color for each piece?

I've released a new version of TetraGomy. With this update, I added labels to the sensitivity slider (also the volume slider) as Douglas suggested. I've also added on-screen keys for moving the pieces. I was able to cut the file size of the app down to about 1.6mb from 2.2 mb, with some tweaking of the graphics. Though I'm not sure if it displays correctly on every screen size now, it did in the emulators but that is no guarantee. So any feedback (especially if it displays correctly in your phone) and suggestions would be appreciated.

The actual graphics didn't change just the way I support multiple screen sizes. Comming from a j2me background with hundreds of phone models using j2me and a dozen or more screen sizes, I would write my games to scale the graphics to the phones screen. This is probably not the best way to do it, as some screens have different aspect ratio's and can cause the graphics to look strectched. But I was just making the j2me games as a hobby and didn't have the time to make dozens of versions and still wanted them to be playable on most phones.

With android you have 3 main screen sizes, 320x480, 240x320 and 480x800, but also can have various pixel densities or dpi. There are other screensizes (especially with tablets), but not on many devices so far. Before I was using 3 copies of the graphics in the game to support each screen size from one app. Now I just have one copy of the graphics and scale them to match the phone its running on during run-time. So all the graphics sizes;, positions, touch positions, sizes are not hard coded or "known" but instead based off the size of the screen and adjusted in code by formulas during run-time (this makes things a bit complicated). I tested each screen size on emulators, but this is no guarantee.

In order to use only one size of graphics, I had to set the apps settings of "any density"=false (or provide 3 copies, it would give me a compile error with one copy). But with this setting the android java virtual machine will attempt to auto adjust the graphics for different pixel density devices.. So the java virtual machine may scale my graphics before I even load them (because of pixel densities) so I was not sure how they would look after I scaled them also.

So you can see why I'm hungry for feedback and want to know if it runs well on different phones. Anyone with suggestions or feedback is appreciated.

— modified on Jul 24, 2010, 7:46:37 AM

Correction to my last post:

I found out today that the reason I was getting a compile error when building with any density set to true, was because I had deleted the low density and high density folders in the project. I found out that if I included the folder but left them empty it would build with any density and only one set of graphics files.

Google recently released a new developer market agreement, for developers to sign. While reading it some points made me nervous. Before I was ok with just making TetraGomy and putting it on the market to see if the owner's of the mobile rights to tetris would try to oppose it. And if so, just take it down. But while reading the new agreement, there is a clause that if google takes down any app for copyright or trademark infringement, then the developer must pay back any sales of the app from within the last year. I wouldn't mind paying them back either, but you also have to pay back the 30% that google charges. This could cost me money, so I'm thinking of taking TetraGomy off the market before it gets too many downloads. Do you guys have any advice? Also does anyone know how it would be ruled wether TetraGomy is infringing on Tetris? It's not really tetris, but a variant, so I'm not sure. I emailed the owners of tetris mobile rights, asking if they would pursue this case, but they have not responded yet. Thanks!

I released TetraGomy back to the market, and made a few improvements. https://www.nextpit.com/en/android/market/apps/app/xdebugx.tetraGomyA/TetraGomy-Free

I'm only publishing the free version, because I cannot get any response from the owner of tetris about if it is infringing any copyrights. So I'm not taking a risk and publishing the paid version, and possibly paying back more money than I would make on it.

Please give it a try and let me know what you think of TetraGomy, thanks!