Apologies. Also, game released.

Published November 30, 2011
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First off I'd like to apologise for the seemingly "lack of context" in my latest journals. That's what I get for not being used to writing these and being in a hurry all the time.

I've been working on a port of a very successful iOS game to Android for 9 months now, and yesterday the game was finally released. It consists of pushing (flinging) some furballs into other furballs in order to push them out of the game board, until you have only one furball left and "win" the puzzle. Some of you might remember it as "Fling!" on the iOS. Well, we kept everything exactly the same on Android, and you can buy it or try it.

For more on how the game is played you can also check this youtube video:
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I hope you like it, me and CandyCane LLC went past some very hard times porting this, and you can finally try our effort.

Cheers,
Nuno Silva.
2 likes 2 comments

Comments

Gaiiden
[quote]
me and CandyCane LLC went past some very hard times porting this
[/quote]
Stuff you can share?
December 03, 2011 03:17 PM
Little Coding Fox
[quote name='Gaiiden' timestamp='1322925467']
[quote]
me and CandyCane LLC went past some very hard times porting this
[/quote]
Stuff you can share?
[/quote]

Things ranging from poor APIs (we were targetting Android 1.6 as the minimum OS version), to very poor tools, to your device suddenly rebooting from a stack overflow, to extremely poor support for native code, to even some java code that works in a way on one device to behave differently on another device.

E.g., their SoundPool class that would not let you know when a sound was done playing, or their MediaPlayer decided to throw exceptions when the documentation specifically said there not to be a thrown exception from a particular function, like the isPlaying method,

Another example would be that more often than not, Eclipse would decide to do stuff you didn't want and would be stubborn enough as to actually keep doing it no matter how many different attempts you did at whatever you were trying to do. One example was when I was linking a resource, and it would instead move the files to the folder where my main source was, and when I tried to remove the link, it'd delete my entire source folder, regardless of it saying it wouldn't delete the files.

A more recent example would be when I updated the Android SDK and the Eclipse ADT plugin and Eclipse decided to compile everything to .class files instead of building the app package. I had to do some serious hacking and to download 1.5GB of the old SDK from a friend since there was no other way to get an older version with the API levels I needed.

Another example would be the Native Development Kit (NDK)'s debugger script that ran GDB and would more often than not fail or otherwise would properly attach to the app, but ignore any crash or any interaction.

You'd also often get a crash, check the crash log on the logcat, and it'd give you a very poor callstack, usually with either no callstack or with only one frame (it missed all other frames or something similar). Sometimes we wouldn't even get a call stack, since it'd crash halfway while dumping the crash (seriously, this happened several times).
December 03, 2011 03:28 PM
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