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Implementing OpenFeint with Android

November 10, 2011 in Programming

UPDATE Since this has become one of our more popular pages I just wanted to update it to say that UPSAT has now launched! If you find this page useful or just want to see some of the cool things we did with OpenFeint, including custom notifications, then please consider supporting us by getting the full version of UPSAT and by following us on Facebook or Twitter! UPDATE So you have an amazing Android game and you’ve decided you want to join the 21st century and add social connectivity? Well kudos and welcome to the party! If you’re reading this then you’re probably at least somewhat interested in OpenFeint and what is entailed in getting this working with your game. The good news is it’s actually really easy. The bad news, since OpenFeint is relatively new on Android, the documentation can be a bit lacking which makes the task SEEM very daunting. I have to admit that I was a little bit nervous about doing this before I started, but in the end it only took me around 5 hours. So, if you have any coding skills whatsoever (unlike myself) then you could probably get it done in less. I’ve
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Keeping With Tradition

October 14, 2011 in Featured, Programming

Gather ’round boys and girls. For story time today we’re going to talk about the importance of meeting user expectations for how android apps operate. If you’ve ever used an android phone, you’ve probably noticed that the two most important buttons are the Back and Home keys.  When you press the Back button you expect to, well duh, go back. And when you press home (and click your heels together three times) you expect to be brought back to rural kansas with Todo by your side. No? Oh well then you probably were just trying to get back to your home screen.   TECHNICAL CONTENT WARNING!   Now what you may not be aware of is what these two buttons are actually doing. I won’t get too bogged down in the details, but essentially Android OS uses different stacks for your applications that hold the different things you are doing, known as activities. You could have a messaging stack, web browser stack, or a contacts stack for example. If you’re in the messaging stack, the first screen you see is put on the bottom of the stack. Once you select “text messages” from this screen, your list of text messages is called forward
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Achievement Unlocked: Achievement Bar Complete

October 12, 2011 in Programming

So I’m pretty exhausted at work right now. After this long weekend of staying up until 5am every night, I’m finding it difficult to go to sleep on time. I have to get up at 530 to beat the morning DC traffic so going to bed at midnight may not seem late for some, but for me it’s a day ruiner. It was worth it though. I finished coding the notification bar and have thus completed the last element of the UI. It looks really cool when the bar pops down from the top of the screen to let you know you’ve done something notable (good or bad). I mocked up some achievements and insults to be displayed and it’s quite hilarious when the red bar comes down saying something like “Only your mom thinks you’re special” or “You messed THAT up?!” Even though I wrote it, the taunting still somehow gets under my skin and I find myself wanting to prove the computer (and therefore myself) wrong. I know, it kind of makes me a crazy person. Although I haven’t written the achievement system yet, or even the insult database, I designed the Notification bar to be very simple to
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Frustration and Jubilation

October 8, 2011 in Programming

We’re coming up on being half-way through our weekend game dev party and I’m glad to say that we have a lot to show for it. You’ve probably already seen some of the artwork Ryan has created in his last post and I’ve made huge progress with the UI.  If things keep going this way we’ll be done with this game in no time! I’ll try to touch on some of the stuff I’ve worked on during the past day. All of the UI elements besides the achievement/insult bar are up and running. I spent a good amount of time coding debugging the animations for the timer and multiplier bars to make sure that they’d work on different size screens. I got pretty lucky on this one because the animations ran fine on my phone, but I tried running the game on a 320×240 screen to test for another issue and discovered they weren’t running properly there. Thankfully it didn’t take very long for me to figure out what the issue was. (Designing for different size screens is pretty much the most difficult thing about working with the Android platform) Unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing about an issue
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