Renoki: Making An Android Game (part 1)

I finally decided that I will man up and port Renoki to Android. For those who don’t know, Renoki is the iphone game that Mark and I released that failed phenomenally. You can see it here:

The iphone version is free now and may or may not still be available on the app store. Despite the fact that it didn’t sell at all and had some pretty large stability issues, I want to port it to Android. My hopes is it will be a side project to do in our spare time, as well as allow me to fix some of the shortcomings I found in the iPhone version that Mark never fixed. Once it’s complete I’ll probably buy an Android license and release it for free.

I started exploring some different Tutorials for Android. I first took a look at cocos2d, a graphics library that Mark used to program Renoki. Some developers are in the process of porting over cocos2d to android, and there is a basic version available. I looked it over and I don’t really want to commit to using it while it’s still in development. I’d rather go through the headache of controlling all my animations with the Android native graphics library. Also, considering Renoki is very simple in terms of animation, I think I can handle the load.

Right now I’m taking a look at the LunarLander sample game available on the Android Dev site. It seems to have pretty good documentation, so we’ll see where we get.