We just released our first app for Android (see the News post about that)!  I’m happy about that, but ugh, I feel bad for neglecting Don’t Blow It for so long.  Even so, it needs to wait a little longer.  Android has been where all my programming time has gone lately.  A big part of that work was getting my OpenGL wrapper library, SDL_gpu, further developed and working with OpenGLES.  It’s actually quite nice to use and it covers all of the features I currently need.

It was pretty exciting to get stuff running on my Kindle Fire HD.  I even ported Don’t Blow It to Android just to see how it would go.  It actually turned out great, but I won’t plan on releasing an Android version due to all the extra work it will be to get gamepads working and the game performance tuned and all that.  Maybe there will be an Ouya version eventually.  I’m really not a fan of games being brought to a touch device when the game is not designed for it (e.g. anything with a virtual joystick).  They can still be fun and worthwhile, but input works way better when it feels good and natural.

I did some fishing around for more Android devices to test our app on and I managed to get my mitts on a Samsung Vibrant (Galaxy S).  It was great fun to brick it for a while (sarcasm), then figure out how to get CyanogenMod on it.  In the end, I got a brand new version of Android on a phone that is not bad at all (relative to my sweet Nokia 1100).  It helped to fix a few bugs and now the app is out there for Kindle Fires and other Android devices.  We have already learned something concrete about the app market.  Discoverability stinks.  We will need to do quite a bit of marketing to make any sort of money on this app.

I’ll probably make a game on Android next.  I still have to see what kind of income we can manage when we do it right.