![]() Going back and playing Triple Pop again to make the video above made me think ‘that’s really quite fun, it’s worth remembering’, so I have □įrom a purely technically standpoint, creating an iPhone version of Triple Pop would be really quite easy. Soon, I hope to write about more games I’ve been involved with, if for no other reason than to have a record for myself. Mobile development has moved on a lot since 2002. Today, at FinBlade, we use Bedrock from Metismo, which allows us to target both J2ME and numerous other systems such as iPhone and Google Android, all from a single source code base. Further to that, as iomo was acquired by Infospace and game production really stepped up, we adopted a full featured in house framework developed by Elkware (another Infospace acquisition). Later on, we used a system of pre-processing the source code for different devices and SKUs, but this early approach only scaled so far. Triple Pop had no underlying technology of note, it was just over 5000 lines of Java code and some PNG images. This could be an in house system built up over time, or a middleware platform bought from a 3rd party. The specifics of doing this are the subjects for another time though.Īnyone developing a commercial J2ME application or game today needs to have a framework in place that assists with device fragmentation and porting. Today, the codebase of a J2ME title must support hundreds of devices from many manufacturers. When I wrote Triple Pop, it was meant for a single class of very similar devices. Today I code on top of a middleware framework that is the culmination of 7 years of mobile phone development experience. Basically the same tools, but there’s one difference. Today I use SlickEdit 2009 (v14 in old numbers), Perforce, Java 6 (or 1.6 in relation to 1.3), Ant and Proguard as an obfuscator. My basic development tools in 2003 were SlickEdit (v4 I think then), CVS, Java v1.3, Apache Ant and an obfuscator, at the time I used JODE. Looking back, the aspect of development that strikes me the most is the similarity with how I do things today. Early on we didn’t have actual devices, but the emulator turned out to be a pretty accurate model for the real thing, something Nokia sadly didn’t continue in later years! The game didn’t tax the device to any great length, it ran in about 60k of memory, jar size was less than 32k in the end, and it loaded quickly. The concept was simple and an implementation already existed to set the standard, there wasn’t much need for innovation or fancy coding. To be honest, there’s nothing very interesting to say about the development cycle of the game. I won’t write too much about the game play, a video is worth way more than some words to show you what it’s about. I still had to write the Java code from scratch, but there was no need to invent everything myself. I lifted the algorithms for the heap of bubbles collapsing and rotating directly from the Symbian code. I had the C++ Symbian code available to refer to when writing the Java version, which helped a lot. Triple Pop was already available as a Symbian application for the Series 80 communicator range, and we got the contract to write a Java version. The LCD response time was pretty slow, any attempt at animation over about 10 frames per second blurred terribly. It’s CPU was actually pretty nippy too, maths and game logic almost never turned out to be bottlenecks, it was always the screen updating that took time. The 7210 had a 128×128 colour display, could run jar files that were up to 64k and had 210k of runtime heap. Until then, they had the 34i with Java embedded, but these had 96×65 1 bpp screens (that’s 2 colours, black and white, or dark grey and light grey on the phone!). The 7210 was one of the first colour screen Nokia J2ME devices. It was a white label game for Nokia Series 40 devices, initially the 7210, but it found it’s way onto dozens of similar devices. Triple Pop was the first Java J2ME game I coded at iomo, back in about 2002.
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