Well – I’m very excited. If you’ve been following the Twitter feed at all, you know that I’ve been working at a breakneck pace trying to get Galactic Blast completed. You might recognize the title from the demo game featured in our tutorial on creating a Blackberry game. The commercial release of Galactic Blast is built off a very similar framework to what’s featured in the demo, only with a LOT of extra stuff added – pre-rendered 3d graphics, bonus rounds, weapon upgrades, etc.
So without further ado, screenshots!
The Gamma-3 base - the final boss.
The demolition controller destroys the derelict ships in decommissioned shipyard A-3. In this case, however, he's trying to destroy you! Third boss in the game.
The Sutoran Nebula is home to the Phoraxian Shadow Fleet. They hide within the clouds of the nebula to make detection more difficult.
Every 5 waves your SR-13 kicks it into hyperdrive, and you enter the bonus round. Pass through as many rings as possible for maximum points!
Main menu. Start/Resume game, Instructions, View High Scores, Change settings (Sound/Music/Vibration, etc), and Quit.
Title Screen
I just submitted the application to RIM for approval on App World, so hopefully it checks out and it will be available for download soon! More to come…
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Hi Toni
Great to see the progress, how much will the app cost?
Would like to add my thanks for your great tutorial.
Keep up the good work
Thanks for the kudos about the tutorials, I appreciate it. I’m thinking I might gear one toward the Playbook soon.
The game will be $2.99 USD – it’s just in the queue right now to be reviewed by RIM. They said their staff is a little less during the holidays, so hopefully once the start of the year rolls around, it won’t take them too long.
Hi Toni
Look forward to it appearing.
Did you get the sound mixing fixed?
Also some of the API’s in your tutorial are depreciated (getScreenHeight for example). I know the newer preffered way is to use the Display class, but this requires signing. Is that why you didn’t use them?
Again about API’s, the docs that RIM supply suggest using OPEN GL ES as your main class for displaying graphics. To be honest I haven’t looked at the document in detail so i might be on a wrong one here. You make no mention of this in your tutorial and I just wondered why. Also out of intrest do you stick to the same API’s you used in the tutorial, in your published game or have you usd the recommened API?
Sorry for all the questions, just would really like to know.
Cheers
LOL no problem, I like questions!
For the mixing, in this game I overcome the issue by using the Player engine for playing the midi music, and then use the Alert class to play sound effects. It means simpler sound effects (non PCM), but they actually aren’t too bad (I don’t think). That wav mixer I was working on couldn’t do true real time mixing, unfortunately.
You’re right about my reasoning for originally not using the Display class in the tutorial – I wrote the tutorial so anyone could do it completely free without registering for the signed API. I did, however, make use of it in the commercial game, since I needed to use a few other signed APIs as well.
OpenGL ES wasn’t around when I originally wrote that tutorial (I don’t think, maybe it was) – I think they introduced it in 5.0? That tutorial will work at least all the way back to 4.5 – as will the commercial product as well, it’s compiled with the 4.5 api. And while it’s good to prepare for future phones in general, at this point I feel like it’s almost not worth it, as not a ton of Blackberrys have the hardware OpenGL acceleration, and by the time more of them do, I wouldn’t be surprised if RIM moves over to the QNX based OS, since I think they will have to at this point to compete in the future market.
Thanks for the kudos about the game in general, hopefully they’ll ok it this upcoming week! I’ve heard horror stories sometimes though about them taking a while.