Star Pool Android game

I got interested in game development by building maps for Counter-Strike – I created a bus station map from my native town and tried to create a map of my school. That gave me basic understanding of virtual world structure.

Later I started reading OpenGL tutorials for Android. I was happy like a child when I saw my first triangle on the screen.

Then I made cube with rock texture on it and first thoughts about creating my own game started coming to me. It looked like porting Portal to Android is achievable task for a newbie. I really underestimated amount of work to do. Good for me there already was Portal in Google Play and I stopped on creating single room.

Then I decided to create something more simple. I saw zero gravity billiards in Futurama, and decided to quickly implement that idea (before others do). I still underestimated amount of work to do. And by the way, someone managed to publish zero gravity billiards before me.

*Screenshot from Futurama, season 7, episode 5

At that moment, approximately 3 years ago, I started creating my first game Star Pool - billiards in space. At the begining [beginning] I had basic Java knowledge and minimal image editing skills. I worked in parallel with my job and there were large gaps when I had no time for the game.

Graphics Engine

I borrowed graphics engine structure from tutorials. Bad idea. The more features I added to it, the less flexible and more fragile it became. Till this time I did two major refactorings and I'd give myself C for this task. If I could travel it time, I'd tell myself - "THINK THROUGH THE ARCHITECTURE!!!". Nevertheless, my engine loads quickly and works pretty fast.

This part of the application was the most interesting for me. You see all changes you do immediately. I was getting a lot of positive emotions when my efforts appeared on the screen. For example, in many games sky is actually a small cube drawn around the camera with sky texture on it. The cube is drawn on the first place, all other objects in the world are drawn after it, overlapping the sky. So the sky remains in places where no object was drawn. Cube is always drawn around the camera, so it looks like the sky is moving with the camera. And one more - the camera actually doesn't move, it's always located in (0, 0, 0), all other objects move relatively to the camera.

*Image taken from here

Physics Engine

Since my main objective was gaining knowledge, I decided to make my own physics engine as well. (And also because I got bored reading manuals and investigating other engines).

I took into consideration my experience in graphics engine, and I tried to think through the architecture before implementation. Comparing to the graphics engine, there was muuuuch more math in physics engine. It was school math though. Additionally I tried to make my code very effective, so there were no lags in the game. When I started testing, rack break worked really slow because of multiple balls collisions. It disappointed me a lot. I thought I wrote physics almost perfectly, I had no idea how to increase performance. Turned out it was audio player lagging, trying to play too many collisions at once. So I fixed the problem by adding the sound of multiple ball hits.

Textures

When the game was pretty stable and I started to think about release, I remembered that I used textures from other commercial games. I started searching but I couldn't find good quality textures for free. So I decided to draw them myself (in Paint.net). That is experience as well! But I'm not good at design, so I had to paint my textures similar to ones I used before. Game icon took most of the time. Seriously, I had to create it myself. I bothered my friends for several days asking if they like it and what I should change. Isn't it awesome?

Release

I had to postpone many features that I planned in the beginning. Each feature assumed tons of work, and I wasn't sure if I ever finish this game. I chose a basic set of functionality that has been included in a final version. Frankly speaking I'm writing this article hoping that you'll download the game and leave a feedback - it doesn't matter if it's positive or negative. It will be the mark I deserve. If a miracle happens and I get enough downloads, I will continue development and add more features to the game.

Thanks!