Long Time, No See

I haven't written anything here lately because, well, I've been swamped, and I mean like seriously submerged in the murky depths of work, travel, and more work.  We're talking Creature from the Black Lagoon levels of swamped here.  I'm probably growing gills.  That would actually be pretty cool.


Apparently I need to, at the very least, log in to the blog a little more often because I was pretty surprised to find 45 comments awaiting moderation today.  Sorry about that.  I turned off moderation for now, and unless the spammers ruin it, we can leave it off.

That said, let's lay down some ground rules.

1) If you're stuck, or have a question about a particular level, posting a comment here is probably not the fastest route to an answer.  I don't have time to answer (I'm swamped, remember?), so another forum someplace might be a better bet.

2) I love bug reports.  I especially love bug reports that are entered into bug reporting systems.  If you'd like to report a bug (or, as the case seems to be most commonly, a feature request), there's a whole official-looking system all set up for you already.

3) There's some pretty interesting code discussion going on at the forum setup for that purpose.  If you want to talk code, that's the right spot.

So, being swamped, I don't have a whole lot of new information to report, so I'll leave you with two cool things.

First: there are at least five games on the Market that were built with Replica Island code: Android Jump (Papijump clone), Prototype (an Arkanoid game with some interesting twists), Greedy Pirates (a Nanaca Crash sort of game with cannon balls instead of safe-for-workified girls), Super Treasure Rocket (a platformer), and Project G.E.R.T. (I'm not sure what to call this one).  Though not yet on the Market, there's also a pretty neat Fruit Ninja clone, complete with 3D fruit to slice, that was built on the RI code.  I think that's pretty freaking awesome. Update: We can add Ski Classic and Auto Traffic to the list, as well as Pocket Racing to list!  These games were built with SpriteMethodTest source, which is basically the primordial version of the renderer in Replica Island.

Second: Here's a picture of the Replica Island booth (part of a larger Android booth) at Tokyo Game Show this week.  This was all put together by a third-party event organizer, and while I gave them permission to show the game, I had no idea it'd be so, I dunno, official looking.  Cool!