Recently, I don't have much time to work on any games, but I still programming as part of work.  I still hope to get back to making games, but in the meantime, I will be posting interesting findings from my non-game development here: http://sm4.github.io/

I am currently focusing on AWS and I hope I can later use this to create multi-player games!

I haven't posted anything recently. After finishing my book, I have decided to put 100% effort into my other hobby and that is learning Japanese. I started from zero and now, after 6 months of school and another 6 months of daily use, I can say I can communicate with Japanese native speakers.

However I always had troubles finding something to read on my level. So I decided to start a website that will help beginners, elementary and pre-intermediate Japanese learners with reading.

Please welcome yomimaru.com.

I have finished the last chapter of my book and half of the chapters are finalized by the publisher. Right now the technical editor is making sure the book looks good and checks for the last mistakes that has been left in the remaining chapters.

It's been a great journey and I am looking forward to holding the book in my hands. According to the contract, I can use a little piece of the material in the book here on this website, so I am going to take a piece of code and post a short tutorial. If you are interested in seeing the piece, let me know! (comments, facebook, twitter, g+).

Please stop submitting new flappy bird clones. I am not going to review any of them.

It worked for a while, but it doesn't work anymore. Seriously, stop making the clones for profit. I believe making a flappy clone at school or as a programming excercise is a good thing. If you are looking for a first game to learn some new engine, go ahead. Flappy Bird is an excellent choice. But do not expect to make money from it.

On a side note, some people are very creative when using the flappy bird craze. Especially now, when Dong Nguyen announced he's going to release a new, better version of his game. Here's an excellent example how to use the phrase "new flappy bird" to attract more attention to the game called 2048.  You will see this link when googling fo the said phrase. And the first paragraph of the article even mentions another famous game: "This latest addictive gaming sensation [2048] is like Candy Crush for math geeks." SEO FTW.

If your precious Xperia ZR in standby mode doesn't turn on the screen immediately after your press the power button, don't panic. This happens to many people on all Xperia phones Z/ZL/ZR after the latest update to Android 4.3. If that is your case too, most likely it is not a hardware problem. It is a known bug on Xperia phones running official Sony Jelly Bean update.

In fact the phone works. The button press gets registered, but it takes some time to wake up. Maybe when you press it repeatedly, you turn it off again and then it seems it's not working at all. Or the first button press wakes up some process and only the second button press is registered as the real button press.

I suspect the delay is caused by something running in the background and in my case it was the stamina mode. It can also be something else. Maybe some other battery saving app or any other process running in the background. I have set up the stamina mode to keep most of my messaging apps running. When I turn off the stamina mode, tha lag is gone and the button works normally!

If you need to generate some nice promotional pictures, it's good sometimes to put them into context of a real device. You can of course take a picture of your phone or tablet with your game, but I bet it won't look good enough.

Here are two tools that can help you generate the art and make it look more professional:

1. Official Google Device Art Generator - which generates the art for Nexus Devices
2. Android Asset Studio - free tool that offers few more devices

So here I am, a month after Giftiz featuring promotion started. The question is now, does Giftiz significantly increase you downloads? The answer is: yes, if your download numbers were very small.

I believe you can make decent money from ad supported game when you reach about 100.000 downloads in the first month based on other people's experience and my own humble beginnings. Giftiz gave me approximately 2300 downloads in a month - 2000 in the first five days.

This might be enough to generate initial interest. A spike in your downloads that will make Google Play store algorithm to notice you and show your game in the Top New Free games. Moreover 20% of these installs come from France. Giftiz is a French company after all. This will give you significant boost in French store.

But it's not good for anything else. The people coming from Giftiz might be able to generate about $10 - $20 revenue on AdMob. They install your game, play until they finish the mission and leave immediately afterwards.

Giftiz is an app discovery service for Android. They offer real gifts for playing games. People are motivated by the gifts to download a game, play it for a while to complete a "mission" and earn XP points that can be spent on the gifts. This article is a review of the Giftiz service from the perspective of the game developers.

So what's in it for the developers? Giftiz has quite a large number of "players" that use the Giftiz app. Your game will be offered through this app and you can be sure the players will play it for about 5 minutes - that is the requirement of the mission. What exactly is a mission is upto you.

What's the catch?

What is the costs of this publicity? Well of course it's not for free. At least most of the time. Giftiz is a paid service for developers. Developers pay for each install coming from Giftiz. If it is worth or not depends on the deal you can get from them. But of course to create a successful game, you need to get as much publicity as you can in the first month in the store...

My story

The company behind Giftiz contacted me  first with another offer - their mobile ads AdBudiz. But I was not really interested. It was shortly after the release of Mr. Dandelion and I made a joke that the only thing I need is some publicity and they actually offered me Giftiz. For free. Since Mr. Dandelion is my research project, I said why not?

I was told that Giftiz discovers suitable Indie games and offers them Giftiz deal for free. I bet it's profitable for them, because they need to keep the players engaged. And of course the paying customers need this too - to be discovered from more places. Pyramid Mover is another example of a game that got this deal.

Implementing Giftiz was very simple. They have a SDK that does everything for you and useful example projects. A Giftiz representative just checked if everyting works and that was it. I spent less than an hour adding it to my game plus some time mailing with Giftiz.

Yesterday was the first day of "featuring" of my game - which means yesterday the people can start playing my game to complete a mission. In my case it's completing first three levels. The featuring came quite late and won't help me to get to Top New category - simply because I am already past the 30 days of being new. Giftiz said that the paying customers have priority over free deals.

Conclusion

My game has been in the store for about 2 months now and the number of new installs was slowly dropping. After the Giftiz featuring, I immediately got cca thousand new installs on the first day. I can summarize the effect of Giftiz in 6 weeks when my featuring ends. I am going to post another article about it. Right now I believe this service has a potential to help you to get you to the Top New category. It all depends on the timing and the cost.

Here's the same graph after 4 days of featuring. About 1600 new downloads from Giftiz. I will try to get the real numbers from them for the second part of the article.


UPDATE: Graph after two weeks with Giftiz:



I am not affiliated with Giftiz and I am not getting anything extra from them for writing this.

Continue to part 2...

Finally, Sony made a phone that is exactly what I always wanted. 720p HD resolution on 4.5" screen, enough memory, big battery, good camera and dust and water proof. You can read positive reviews all over the web, so I won't bother adding another one.

After a week of being a happy Sony Xperia ZR owner, my wifi stopped connecting to networks. I can't connect to any network I have tried, but the list of networks is ok. It stopped working suddenly. My previously used networks are all marked as "Saved", but when I try to connect the following happens:

1. Saved (doesn't even change when tapped)
2. Connecting -> Saved
3. Connecting -> Authentication problem -> Saved

This is what I have tried to fix it:

1. Restart phone
2. Restart phone, take out battery, SD card and SIM card
3. Restart wi-fi router
4. Connect to another network (sometimes works with some networks)
5. Forget network -> Type password again
6. Connect another Android device to the same network
7. Connect another non-android device to the same network
8. Change the router wireless settings to WEP, WPA and unsecured
9. Factory reset of the router
10. Sony Companion -> Repair
11. Factory reset of the phone

And nothing worked. I packed the phone into the box ready to go to service centre and went to cook a delicious stew which took about 3 hours and filled my apartment with heavenly smelling goodness. I came back to check whether there are any data in the phone and it started to work again. Just like that. I did not do anything.

But my joy lasted only for a while, because after the phone lost the wifi connection, it didn't connect again. I took the phone to work to try more wifi access points. I have tried about 10 of them on the way there and three more in the office. Same result. I tried to dig deeper and this is what I found in LogCat:

09-18 09:10:12.130: W/wpa_supplicant(3838): wlan0: Failed to initiate AP scan
09-18 09:10:12.811: I/wpa_supplicant(3838): wlan0: Trying to associate with (here is the router MAC) (SSID='smartus@unifi' freq=2427 MHz)
09-18 09:10:14.023: I/wpa_supplicant(3838): wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-ASSOC-REJECT bssid=(here is my router MAC) status_code=1
09-18 09:10:19.088: I/WifiManager(2391): Process ndroid.settings requested an active scan
09-18 09:10:22.812: I/wpa_supplicant(3838): wlan0: Authentication with (here is the router MAC)

Same thing for every router. Sometimes the connection went through and then I would connect for a while. CTRL-EVENT-ASSOC-REJECT should only happen when the network is too busy and the AP rejects your connection attempt. I think the phone simply started to misinterpret signals from the router.

I took the phone the service centre, where they tried to flash upgraded ROM, but it did not help and the case was closed with the conclusion "faulty hardware".

I hope nobody will ever need to read this article. But if you are reading it, because you have the same problem, it might be hardware issue.

Update

The phone body was replaced. Wi-fi works very well now, but will wait for two weeks to make the final conclusion!

Update 2

The phone seems to work after another two weeks. No issues with wi-fi. Hopefully it's gonna stay this way. Also this article made it to TOP 5 articles this month. Looks like this is pretty common issue.

Update 3

Xperia user Emmanuel suggested that it might be a software issue caused maybe by a faulty hardware. The wi-fi region code gets set to wrong value or unset. If you have a rooted phone, you can try fixing it by this software: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1982149

My phone however didn't have a problem with wi-fi since they replaced the body.

Update 4

Update to Android 4.3 Jelly Bean has been released recently. Try it as an option too.

Funny note

Anybody noticed that all new Sony Xperia phones pictures have the same screen? It always says Thursday January 3, 10:35. Somebody was very lazy... Just for comparison, Xperia Z and Xperia ZR. But you will see it on pictures of all Xperias from this year.

During the development of Mr. Dandelion I came across a lot of pages with useful resources. Sprites to download, music and information about marketing your game.

As a total n00b in game industry, I enjoyed working on my game until I realized how hard it is to get it out there. One of the pages I found helped me a lot because it offers big lists (literaly) of articles and sources useful for developers of every game genre and platform out there.

I can highly recommend going through the big lists at Pixel Prospector. They don't list that many resources for Android Game Development nor for AndEngine, but a lot of articles are applicable generaly.

As an excercise in CSS, HTML and XML, I have tried to make this blog look more professional. I have used an existing free template (see footer) and removed all elements that I did not like. Also blogger.com doesn't really handle multiple pages very well. The pages in the menu are links to searches for certain labels, but it'll do. I hope this new design looks good enough for the new purpose of this blog: game reviews & tutorials.

Game reviews

The biggest problem of Indie Game Developers is publicity. I learned that the hard way. I got positive feedback from people playing my game, but simply not enough players found it. I believe every little bit of publicity will help fellow Indies so I have decided to give it a try. I play those games anyway.
I will start reviewing games from people who already helped me during my development, but if you want to request a review, click on Submit game for review link in the top bar.  It's free with a small condition. See the submission form for details. I plan to do a review or two per week.

Tutorials

There's never enough tutorials and since I have already made one published and one unpublished game in AndEngine, I want to share my experience in a series of tutorials. There are already some tutorials for AndEngine, but this simple and free 2D engine always suffered from a lack of documentation - so I guess it won't hurt to write an article or two!