As part of the job of porting Cherry Chaser to Android I want to make a number of improvements to the game.  One feature that I felt needed improvement was how the nudge feature worked.

In the Windows Mobile version of the game you would win nudges and then nudge the reels manually using the buttons beneath each reel.  There was no facility to nudge upwards and visibility is limited to only the fruit directly above the winline.  That meant that it was very difficult to get a decent win with nudges.

In Cherry Chaser for Android I've just implemented an auto-nudge feature that will entirely replace manual nudges.  Once the amount of nudges awarded has been established the machine looks for the best possible win attainable with those nudges and then performs the nudges automatically.

I've now got all the cash win and credit functionality working and Cherry Chaser is slowly turning into a playable game.  The gamble feature is also in place although I need to alter the timing code to make it independent of processor speed.  I've also put in vibration feedback as each of the reels stop which feels really nice.

I've now "wired up" all of the lights that can flash on and off on the main play area of Cherry Chaser.  This was one of the most laborious tasks that needed to be done and involved carefully measuring the location and size of each part of the screen that could be independently lit up.  In all the main screen is composed of 62 lights all of which can now flash on and off.

I'm finding some interesting challenges porting my Windows Mobile games, that were all developed in C++, to using java on Android.  It's very handy that the syntax is largely the same but there are quite a few things about java that bug me.  If I came from java to C++ I'm sure I'd be even more distressed, or even horrified.  I have to admit that I am not too fussy about type safe data types and I find the convenience of being allowed to be somewhat reckless with my data in C++ makes up for any extra debugging required.

As Cherry Chaser is a port of the C++ version I'm shoehorning a C++ style on to my java programming.  One particular area where I'm doing things in a non java way is in the use of enum types.  Cherry Chaser enumerates lots of things from the game state to what the names of all the lights are.  At the moment I'm using enums very much as I would in C++ and using the ordinal values far more than I probably should.  For example my array of lights is indexed by an enum type.  Reprogramming to use an enummap would be more appropriate but that would mean rewriting quite a lot of code.

This session I attempted to get my bricks and bats displaying on the screen.  Bricks are arranged in 2 walls, each wall consisting of five rows of six bricks.  The fifth row being elevated some distance above the player's paddle to create an obstacle between the two player's paddles.  Not all the bricks will be present depending upon which level is loaded but for now I am trying to display every brick.

The paddles should (theoretically) be quite simple to display, just draw their sprite on the screen in the right location.  I didn't set things up quite so simply in my C++ version of the game however.  A paddle can expand, shrink and grow lasers, the sprite is made up of not one but up to 9 different texture parts because of this.  I'm attempting to reproduce this method in the java Android version.  I will find out whether it works once I can get it running.

The outcome of my game engine deliberations is that I have decided to use LibGDX.  It's probably the best known Android game engine and has a nice community in its forums.  The developer is very active as well and open to suggestions.  That could be very useful in future.

I had a short coding session today in which I set up my library code stub and then created classes for my paddles and bricks.  Paddles are based upon a sprite class and bricks based upon a basic texture class.  Next step is to load some textures and draw them in on the screen.  Luckily I already have most of the texture assets I will need from the Windows Mobile version of Plasma Duel.