Sometime mid 2010, I got this great idea to make a game for the Android phone platform.  I knew some Java, which is the language used to write programs for the phone, so it seemed like a simple project to undertake.

My first attempt:

Working title: Zombicide

It had a unique fighting system that used a sort of Guitar Hero timing system to charge up attacks and defenses.  In theory it had potential.  In practice, the low frame rate made the timing system too easy.

Here’s a video of the combat concept in “action”: Zombicide combat

Well, that failed.  I was using the software renderer and, simply put, it couldn’t handle the graphics load.

Scrap that one.

Second attempt:

Working title: Pencil Wars

The idea behind this was to do something even simpler with less graphical requirement.  Well, it failed too.  I figured out that I really needed to learn OpenGL to make a remotely effective attempt at making a game.  Back to the books!

Third attempt:

Working Title: Starlight

Youtube link to a video of the Flamethrower for Starlight.

3D!  After many hours studying, screaming at my monitor and begging friends for help, I got a simple 3D engine working.  Importing models was still beyond me, so I tried to use billboards instead.  (A billboard is a flat image that rotates to face to camera at all times.)  Well, between spaghetti code and a poor grasp of spacial math, my billboards failed.  They rotated just fine, but they overlapped and cut each other out.  You can see some of that in the image.

I decided to go back to my roots.  2D gaming, baby.  So I got into my

Fourth attempt:

Working Title: ZombieVille

This was a tower defense game.  It’s actually almost fully coded, just requiring a lot of graphics and some AI for the monsters.  The engine is OpenGL, with the images loaded into textures and applied to squares.  There isn’t any danger of billboards overlapping, so that complication is removed.

But… I got bored of it.  It had an interesting concept, having to harvest your resources to build towers, but in the end it just was lacking some punch.  Besides.  It had ZERO story.  And I’m a writer.  Story is what drives me.  Scrap that game.

Current attempt, number five:

Working title: RPG (original, I know)

This is my baby.  I’ve been thinking about this ever since I started making Android games.  All the other ones were “When I get proficient enough, I’m going to make this game!”  So, now I’m proficient enough.  Let’s get this really going.

The engine is 3D (duh) and rotates 30 degrees left and right.  This is carefully calculated to avoid the problem I ran into with the Starlight attempt, namely, if the camera views from the same angle all the time, the billboards never overlap the wrong way.  Limiting the rotation of the camera prevents the billboards from getting “tangled up” as it were.

Youtube video of some of the combat animations in progress:

To Ready Position

Added a gun and finished the animation