Diary of a footy game
A 3D mobile game
J2ME game source
Billing system

Hmmm... So just what did happen to the footy game.
Well I'm afraid I couldn't decide on suitable controls for a soccer game without having loads of different keys for the movement, shooting and passing and this made it unplayable in my opinion so I decided to move onto another project.

For this project I've decided to do something a little bit more ambitious (mainly to keep myself interested). Inbetween doing a bit of contract work I've started to make a 3D engine. I'm going to try and keep it flexible but my aim is to make a fun 3D racing game so I may stear down this path from time to time. Also for the time being, this will be aimed at Sony Ericsson mobiles that support mascot capsule athough I may do a JSR184 version later.
For some time now I've been familiarising myself with mascot capsule and have created a couple of demos, mainly to teach myself the basics such as camera orientation, blending, particle stuff etc. As a starting point to anyone else wanting to learn 3D for mobiles I'd check out the Sony Ericsson Developer Site

Other useful links:
Blender3D A free package that you can use to create your objects
Blender Plug-in so you can export objects in .bac format
Mascot Tools that you will need to convert bac file to mbac

To the left is a track that I made on blender3d. When I exported it and saved as an mbac file it was a whopping 43k. Couldnt fit many of those in a game, but it served its purpose. I wanted to see how fast it could be displayed on a mobile with the camera moving around under user control. On the whole I was pretty impressed to see it wizz along at 15fps while going along a road and 12fps when going through a tunnel using a SonyE k700i.

With those results in mind I should be able to create a decent 3D racing game hopefully with a few opponents rather than a race against time game.

Left: An early screenshot taken from the emulator.
Its obvious from the above test that I cant make a whole track, as at 43k I wont be able to get that many in the game, so I plan on creating small pieces of track and put them together in the midlet as if you were creating a scalectrix track. Each track section will be between 1 & 5k depending on the level of detail.
I've also had a think about car / track collision detection and due to the fact that you cant get vertices information from an mbac file (according to SonyE developer guidlines) I'm going to need to store track collision information separately, so I'm going to have collision info stored for each type of track section in an ascii or bin file.

Most sections have 50 polygons (quads actually) but we'll have to see how things go. No walls yet but its not a big job to add them to the current sections. The next step is to have a method of building a track from the sections. Information required to build a track will be the type of section, position and orientation of that track section - the orientation will be limited to multiples of 90 degress only to make life easier so that the track joins seamlessly.

Sorry for the delay, I've been doing a lot of contract work lately and nearly everything else had to go on hold, but things should be calming down shortly.

I did manage to squeeze in a little development a while back which just involved tidying the track segments and adding walls. I also decided on a way to store the track data, which I will go into in more detail in my next update. At the moment the track is drawn but track segments in the background overlap those in the foreground so some kind of painter algorithm will be needed to put this right. I'll also give details on this in my next update (if I can get the damn thing to work).

On a slightly different theme I also managed to have a bit of a hack at an Online Game using Flash. Its a version of Drop Ship thats not quite finished yet but feel free to check it out.

I am about to do a series of source code releases starting with DropShip. It was my first hack at a J2ME game so dont expect anything great.
Drop Ship J2ME game source
Dark Horde J2ME game source - forgive me RPG fans but it could be used to create a ray cast game with some performance tweaks, uses game framework which I'll release soon.
Framework J2ME game source for a bluetooth multiplayer game

Future source release will include:
Absorbed - full source includes 2 player bluetooth co-op mode
3d stuff above

I've been working on a billing system to allow users to unlock demos of games from with the game, effectively trying a game before buying. Hopefully it means a demo can be given away on any site and if the mobile user likes the game then they can pay for it there and then with as little hassle as possible. Currently works as follows:-

1. Download a demo
2. Exit the game and a purchase screen is displayed
3. Choose your location and confirm payment
4. Allow the game to send an SMS
5. Restart the game and allow payment to be validated. The full game will now be unlocked.

It may take a minute or two for the payment to be processed.
At present there are 10 countries available with more to come soon.

Demos of Absorbed and Dark Horde now have this payment screen available.