Category Archives: android

Converting a 30 year old game

30 years ago, or there about, I wrote a Dungeon bash game. I called it Dungeon. It was turn based with up to four local players sharing the keyboard and taking it in turns to move their piece, then the monsters had a go and back to start until the mission completed or all the players died.

There were five classes of character, fighter, cleric, wizard, dwarf and elf. The classes set the default and maximum attributes for the player piece.

My brother used to play this game until reasonably recently, as long as you could boot to DOS and run in CGA mode (2 bit graphics – 4 colours), then the game would work.

It is time for a conversion. I am going to try extending my IntelliJ experiments to create a Windows Java version as well as an Android version.

In my subsequent posts I shall talk about the conversion topics as they come up….starting with the fact I can’t “see” the game anymore…

Android with Intellij and Tesco Hudl- week 2

There have been a small number of minor issues to overcome to get up and running.

Issue one: Figuring out how to turn on developer’s mode on the latest Android operating system. Not too big a problem – press the about / build info in settings 7 times. A message popped up but no developer’s menu appeared…

(See various links, youtube clips etc for this). Or here.

Issue two: developer menu only appears if you are logged in with the first account to be created on a device. I tried it with a second account. Doh, a few minutes of frustration with a small lightbulb moment!

Issue three: Tesco’s view is that the HUDL is not a developer platform and hence no USB drivers. This is a little short sighted of them to be honest. Luckily the Samsung drivers work just fine. Thanks Samsung. If I had tried with my Galaxy S3 first on this laptop I may not have even known there was such an issue. (I used Samsung USB driver 1.5.33 which works nicely with the HUDL).

Issue four: Don’t forget to install JRE, Java, git, ant, etc but more importantly go and setup all the appropriate environment variables. (See set or setx commands under Windows).

Everything was now buildable and deployable to my Android device. Yay!

Starting Android Game Development…going for Intellij

Tomlin Games have decided to develop some Android games and apps. Our experiences so far have been somewhat limited using an older ADK and Eclipse. Things have moved on…so we’re going to try some new techniques out and post about what we find.

Options:
1) Use C#, MonoGame and Visual Studio with Mono for Android.
2) Java based development using Eclipse
3) Java based development using Android Studio
4) Java based development using IntelliJ IDEA.

Time to try something new – trying option 4!

We’re also going to use libgdx and I am following this post here.