RetroShips by TLD GAMES is an oldschool vertical scrolling shoot 'em up game. It features retro graphics, great music, very simple controls and ... bullets. Lots of bullets.

The setup is pretty simple - you have a ship equipped with a cannon and there's a lot of things looking forward to destroying you. But there's more - you start with a basic single bullet gun, but by killing the mini-bosses you can get cool upgrades ranging from double barrel cannon, guided rockets to the ultimate kill-them-all megablast. You have only a very limited supply of lives - it takes just five hits to destroy your ship - and even on easy difficulty you will have to push your ship to the limits to survive.

The graphics are really cool. The retro feel of the ship, enemies and bosses goes very well with the special effects like smoke and nebulas. Explosions are pixelated but you won't mind, because it just feels like you are playing on that old machine in an arcade...



The enemies are moving in defined patterns. Whenever you fail to finish a level, you can learn it, go back and do better. This always made replaying the games so worth it! And if nothing helps, there's always the megablast...




Each stage is divided into eight levels, where the eighth level is a boss fight. This plays very well on mobiles, when you might not have enough time to finish the whole stage at once. The boss fight is really challenging and thanks to the saved progress, you can go straight to it. The in-game currency system allows you to upgrade weapons which helps with the harder levels, too.



The epic music playing throughout the game nicely adds to the action atmosphere. You will find yourself humming the tunes after you finish the nasty boss ship!

When it comes to controls, RetroShips use only one finger. It takes some time to get used to it, because the ship is controlled by moving your finger over the screen. You need to find a position where you can comfortably move your ship without obstructing the view. But as soon as you find it, playing the game anywhere is a breeze.

The game is free, supported by ads that popup here and there when you pause or exit the game - so no accidental ad click when you are just about to finish the boss...

Summary

RetroShips is a great addition to the oldschool shoot 'em up genre. If you like similar games, you will like this one too. The simple controls and the arrangement of levels and stages make it easy to play the game anywhere, but the "hard" and unlockable "insane" difficulties greatly improve the replayability.

The game is free, you can download it from Google Play store.

Flappy Bird definitely had an impact on indie game scene. It seems that everyone should create at least one Flappy Bird clone. As a person who reviews games, I've seen about 20 flappy bird clones and I am sure that was just a fraction of all the flappy animals on the market.

Creating a similar game is actually very simple. You can make the whole thing in a matter of hours. I've re-used assets from my previous game Mr. Dandelion's Adventures and I've used AndEngine GLES2-Anchorcenter to create it. I've also used Box2D (the AndEngine's extension), but it was a bit overkill. Nevertheless using Box2D probably saved some time. It was a pleasant programming excercise!

If you like learning by example, here's a list of lists of open source games for Android.

F-Droid - a very large list of open source Android apps and games. They also have their own app that simplifies installation of FOSS (free and open source software). List of games is here.
Wikipedia - you can find everything on Wikipedia. 
Another smaller list of games
A blog entry with 15 open source games

Don't forget to check the licensing of the source codes before you start using them ;)

Unity is probably the most popular game engine for mobiles right now. There are a lot of books and online tutorials on this topic, so what does this one offer? Unity Android Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide will give you exactly what the title promises - beginner's guide. And it does it well.

This article will give you a simple tip how to backup your codes in a cloud and use version control at the same time and completely for free. This option uses Git that is included in Eclipse bundled with Android Development Tools and Dropbox.

Code backup

You are probably doing this already. One of the possibilities is to use a cloud storage service. You can use Google Drive or Dropbox, which is my favourite. If you don't have a Dropbox account, get one (this is a referral link. If you use it, we both get extra 500MB of space to use) and install Dropbox.

You can simply put your workspace or your project directory inside Dropbox (symbolic links work too).  Each change is automatically synced with Dropbox server. As a bonus you have your codes available from anywhere.

I am trying to find 2D game art tutorial websites and blogs to add to the resources page. I am also looking for books about game art. Especially creating art for programmers with little to none experience in creating graphics. I have recently found a really nice blog that is an example of what I am looking for: 2D Game Art for Programmers.

If you know any such website or book you can recommend, let me know by any channel: Facebook, Twitter, Email, Google+, or just comment here. Thanks!

This book should be the first one you read before you start developing games for mobiles. It will tell you all the general information about mobile games starting from the platforms available, how to assemble a team followed by description of each part of modern games such as graphics, music, sounds, user interface and it ends with the most important part - how to design games to be fun.

The book will also tell you how to monetize your mobile game and it describes different business models. It has as a basic the introduction to mobile market and gamers demographics.

As promised, this year starts the monthly round-ups of the submitted games. I will only consider games submitted through the form. Recently I am getting a lot of submissions in email, but most of the time those are not even games. I need an assistant to go through all of them :)

In January, 11 games were submitted through the form. Here are the three I consider the most interesting of them.

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Tsunami Run - Rory Adventure by ValkA

Rory is a little creature trying to escape a tsunami wave. The game looks very simple from the start, but the first sight is deceiving. You will find the gameplay very smart and not as easy as it seemed. Tsunami Run features cute cartoon graphics and a catchy soundtrack.

The best game submitted for review in January 2014 is definitely this arcade puzzle platformer. Overdroy is beautifully designed and polished and offers tons of fun. If you like games like Super Mario, you should not miss Overdroy!

Overdroy Puzzle Platform was published just a few days ago by Roberto T. Fauri. The author created the whole game himself (exluding couple of sound effects). The graphics, music, gameplay. Quoting his own words, he always wanted to create a game and after many years he finally succeeded. And it's a good one!

The game visuals will catch your eye immediately. Short loading times, modern interface, big play button - tap and play. The game explains everything at the beginning. The pace is great. You are taken through few very easy levels in a couple of minutes just to get stuck in level 5 with the first real puzzle. How to activate that exit?

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!