We have been wanting to try the Android platform for some time and just recently bought an HTC Desire phone (It rocks, not so much the multitouch implementation).

Right now we are:

• Investigating the platform, going through the API and Best Practices, to see what kind of games we can do, and how easy it is.
• Decoupling our engine from some libraries like Slick2d and Groovy in order to test if we can reuse it for Android development.

One huge issue with Android right now is that the market has support for selling apps from a little list of countries. Of course Uruguay which is where we are from is not one of those. So we have to see if we can make things that can be supported with ads, donations, other markets (not the main android market), or some other solution.

We will be making some update when we have more knlowledge about this interesting platform.

As we did for Ludum Dare 17, we decided to participate to Ludum Dare 18. In this case, there were two options, the classic : one developer has to develop a game in 48hs from the scratch; and the jam which allows multiple developers to develop a game in 72hs reusing any code and assets they want.

We tried to make the games for the main competition but as we ran out of time we decided to continue and participate to the jam instead.

Our entries are Dude, that’s my bullet from ruben01 and Grappling Hookus from arielsan.

You can try our games and make comments if you want.

As the title says, we have changed the way we were showing the games.

Now, we have a page for each game showing a screenshot, the game’s description and links to play it as an applet or via webstart. This is the page where we would add any content about the game like videos, faq, reviews, comments, etc.

One objective of this change was to make applets more friendly letting you see information about the game before interrupting you with the applet loading and also a friendlier message when you don’t have the correct version of the java plugin for your browser.

If you click on the play as applet link, a new page is displayed showing an image of the game and the game’s instructions, you can load the applet by clicking on the image.

Hope you like the change.

In our never ending quest to improve our skills and learn a little more about designing video games, we decided to make a game called Zombie Rockers.

Zombie Rockers is an example of a match three game like Zuma, Luxor and Pirate Poppers.
Basically, the objective of the game is to prevent a chain of balls of different colors rolling along a given path from reaching the end of the path by throwing balls and making groups of 3 or more balls of the same color.

We choose this game because we thought it would be a simple game, and that we could implement the basic mechanic in a simple way, generating some content and levels and make a full simple game out of it. But the reality was that it was a much harder task that what we initially thought. The basic mechanic has a lot of little details that were hard to represent in an easy way in our framework, and generating content although easy the first time, is hard to modify and tune, and we are too lazy also.

We were working on the game about two months ago and we were waiting to publish it because we wanted it to have the minimum of features it required and to remove all bugs we found. Now that it is in a playable state we decided to put it in the games section.

The biggest problem we have is that the game has the best name ever in the whole wide world, but there are no zombies.

Hope you can give it a try, play the game here.

Our first version of the online server for highscores is up and running on google app engine!

We have updated Jylonwars to use it, please try the game and leave any feedback you may have.