Released : Cave Escape!

Yes! I have finally released my first game as an indie game developer!

It's called Cave Escape, and you can download it on the Android Market.

You can also read about it on my studio's website, Gemas Games.

For this stage, it's only available on android market, although I'm planning on releasing it on other markets for android, and further down the road maybe porting it to iOS platform.

Creating High Score Lists

At some point, we need to decide whether to add local high score list, global high score list, both of them, or none at all.

I myself prefer to add both local and global high score list, as the local high score list can give the player a record of their progress on mastering the game, and the global high score list gives the competitive feeling to the player.

Choosing game engine for Android

This post will focus on 2D game engines, because currently the games that I make are all 2D games.

A few of 2D game engines for Android that I know :

1. AndEngine
   This is the engine I choose, because it has a lot of features(such as network for multiplayer, multitouch support, box2d physics engine integration), and their community is very alive, you can find answers to almost all of your problem with AndEngine in their forum.
   
2. cocos2d
   This is a port of the popular 2D engine for iOS development. If you already have experience developing games in iOS using this engine, you should try this engine for Android.

Beginning game development on Android

Steps needed to set-up working environment for Android development :

1. Install JDK, from here.
2. Install Eclipse from here. You can also use any other IDE, but it's recommended to use Eclipse since a lot of examples and tutorials out there assumed you use eclipse.
3. Download and install the Android SDK, following the instructions here.
4. After you have installed the Android SDK successfully, explore the SDK a bit, and try to setup the android emulator through Eclipse, by going to the menu Window>Android SDK and AVD manager>Virtual devices.