I’ve been super busy (and super productive! Awesome things coming soon!) since I started here at Zynga and didn’t have too much time to keep the AndEngine Games Weekly Roundup coming every week.

Upfront I’m very very sorry for the roughly 100 other projects I could not check out yet – especially the newer ones! So, if you think your game should be up here too, PLEASE let me know!

A lot has happened since the last roundup and now we are having multiple games with over 1.000.000 Downloads and some even above 5.000.000!

You guys are fucking awesome make me very proud!!!

So here is a rough excerpt of week #4 to #13 of the AndEngine Games Weekly Roundup, this time with lots of lots of lots of new awesome and fun games:

Bunny Brawler

Bunny Brawler feels like a mixture of those classic StreetFighter style beat’em’ups paired with some Super Smash Bros hack’n'slay and is surely fun for a couple of hours.

Bunny Shooter

Angry Birds was yesterday, Bunny Shooter is the future! Over 5.000.000 Downloads! Average rating: 4.7! FREE! Download it now! Pedro Kayatt (bestcoolfungames.com) is killing it with another top tier game!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD01EQrnTQk

Constant C

Constant C delivers a unique game style with variable gravity and activation field physics. It is top rated with 4.8 stars!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZF5C8H8Co

Cow and Pig go Home

Cow and Pig go Home is one of the most underrated (Rating 5 Stars) games that just didn’t receive enough attention yet! Fun physics levels with cute graphics.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFQ5dOkhghM

Draw and Rite

Remember that game where you can draw things to the screen that would actually get physical ingame objects? Yes? This game is what you want!

Fireworks

Far over 1.000.000 Downloads make this game, made by Pedro Kayatt (bestcoolfungames.com), a must have on Android. Great graphics, a widely known game concept and endless levels make it fun for hours!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMn3UWc-mwU

Greedy Spiders

Do you like puzzles? Then you want Greedy Spiders, one of the most liked puzzle games out there. Having far over 500.000 Downloads and being feature multiple times says all about this game!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLEdFxkMdrw

Noogra Nuts

Oren Bengigi made this casual game that was featured in the Android Market. The graphics are awesome and the highest score is a true challenge. (Only play this when you are NUTS!) Have you ever seen anything cuter than that Squirrel!?!?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=00fFwZYGyY0

Pipe Swipe

In Pipe Swipe you have to rearrange pipe pieces to make paint flow from the the proper entry to the proper exit. Sounds boring? No! An average rating of 4.75 says different!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QPOiEWBIuc

Reedu

When ‘Myth’ reminds you of something, this game is what you’ll love! (Spiced up with some minigames!). This type of game is pretty much unique on Android.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAy_KRNR5dI

Titan Turret

Simply a classic!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKcmFsVcyPc

Best Regards,
Nicolas

I’m very excited to announce that I am joining the Zynga Mobile team!

Zynga has long been an advocate of the open source community. For example, the key contributors behind cocos2D recently joined Zynga, and I’m proud to join in this tradition.

Rest assured that I will continue to support and contribute to the AndEngine open source project and I will continue to operate the blog and the forums. AndEngine will remain 100% free and open source!

Zynga is growing at a rapid speed and is always looking for powerful minds to join their team. If you are interested in joining a smart, creative company with a passion for taking on new challenges (in SF or in one of Zynga’s other offices), click here for a list of opportunities.

Best regards,
Nicolas Gramlich

and here comes week #3 of the AndEngine Games Weekly Roundup, this time with 4 games:

ChibiWar2

Using the control knobs the player chooses the shooting direction and strength of an arrow, in order to kill the opponent hero. To make the game more interesting, players can also move the ship to make the distance variable and also there is a wind factor in the fight to increase the game’s difficulty.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo37eRIj2zI

Gravity Wins

Pretty much everybody from young to old knows the game ’4-in-a-row’ or ‘connect 4′. Gravity Wins is just like that but with a nice little twist. Every couple of turns, the gravity turns by 90 degrees, changing the current situation completely.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6kccF-CKe0

Le Brickk Mania

Le Brickk Mania is a clean and elegant remake of the classic game Breakout.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6TVi1pi_uQ

Polygon Plummet

Polygon plummet is a physics game where you need a good sense of timing. Over 60 levels require your best balancing, swinging and plumming skills.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFQZVDDvon8

Best Regards,
Nicolas

in the past weeks, the development of AndEngine has been anything but standing still! Following is a list of the significant new features that were added in the >80 changesets of not-even-ended June!

• AndEngine
  • New TextureFormat parameter: RGBA_8888 and RGB_565 (read more)
    • RGBA_8888 the old default value, supporting Texture transparency.
    • RGB_565 preserving memory, not supporting Texture transparency (useful for background!)
  • Managed BufferObject (read more)
  • SpriteBatch to draw multiple sprites with one OpenGL call (read more)
    • Can increase performance to up to 3x!
• AndEngineMultiplayerExtension
  • AutoDiscovery via UDP broadcast (read more)
    • ZeroConfiguration/IDontCareAboutIPs !
• AndEnginePhysicsBox2DExtension
  • Enhanced ContactListener with preSolve(…) and postSolve(…) methods. (Thanks to Mario!)
    • Platform game anyone?
• AndEngineSVGTextureRegionExtension
  • Completely new extension allowing to render SVG files to Textures (read more)

So these are all the new features I didn’t forget about

Best Regards,
Nicolas

this is the second AndEngine Games Weekly RoundUp and this time we do not only sport games!

Face Costume

Face Costume developed by Oren Bengigi is an amazing camera application that applies several effects over a live camera feed. Cartoon faces, devil-horns, beards are just one click away.

(Note: Currently it supports only on Honeycomb tablets, but it might come to your dual-core phone soon!)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD9DPYppVng

Safari HD

Safari HD takes the Bejeweled concept to the next level, by making you stroking along an arbitrary number of adjacent animals of the same type. Spiced up with OpenFeint and rounded up with nice sounds, it puts you right into the heart of Africa.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByfNuYCahfU

ZDefense

ZDefense is an extremely challenging Tower Defense game, that sports amazing graphics, perfectly smooth performance and excellent leveldesign. It is literally fun for hours and will kill your free time, just like it killed mine.

(Note: It might remind you of HexDefense, but it was already in development, when HexDefense was not public yet.)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3ed3CpOwI8

Best Regards,
Nicolas

having visited Google I/O in May one thing I had put to my ToDo list was adding a feature to AndEngine that allows you to easily render SVGs (Scalable Vector Graphics) onto a Texture(Region). Romain Guy dropped a hint on the svg-android project on GoogleCode, which I started looking over about 2 weeks ago.

I was amazed by the simplicity of how many features of SVG can be easily mapped to the Canvas API in Android. I had started off with their original code but soon noticed that they primarily supported a kind of limited SVG format called SVG Basic 1.1 that is not supported as an export format of Inkscape, while it could not parse InkScapes SVG output .

Besides that limitation, a couple of bugs, some missing object orientation and literally hundreds of SVG special cases, I basically came up with a complete recode, that supports the following features: (fixes and feature-wise differences from the original are colored red)

Features

• Groups
  • Inheritance of group-transformations and attributes/properties
• Colors
  • Opacity
  • Formats:
    • rgb(rrr,ggg,bbb)
    • #RRGGBB
    • #RGB
• Gradients
  • Inheritance (lazy initialization, including transform/stop-inheritance)
  • Types:
    • LinearGradients
    • RadialGradients
• Rectangles
  • RoundedRectangles
• Circles
• Ellipses
• Polygons
• Polylines
• Paths
  • SubPaths
  • Fillrule
    • even-odd
  • Commands:
    • M/m – Move to
    • Z/z – Close path
    • L/l – Line to
    • H/h – Horizontal ine to
    • V/v – Vertical line to
    • C/c – Cubic bezier to
    • S/s – Smooth cubic bezier to
    • Q/q – Quadratic bezier to
    • T/t – Smooth quadratic bezier to
    • A/a – Arc to

Supported formats

• Optimized Inkscape-SVG (Recommended Format)
• Inkscape SVG
• Adobe Illustrator SVG

And this is what you can do with it:

Quite nice, hm?

The code to make use of this is (as always) absolutely trivial:

final int size = (isHighResDevice()) ? 128 : 64;
ITextureRegion textureRegion = SVGTextureRegionFactory.createFromAsset(this.mBuildableTexture, this, “gfx/vector.svg”, size, size);

A full example is available here: http://code.google.com/p/andengineexamples/source/browse/src/org/anddev/andengine/examples/SVGTextureRegionExample.java

The SourceCode of the project is available here: http://code.google.com/p/andenginesvgtextureregionextension/

A precompiled, ready-to-use jar is available here: http://andengineexamples.googlecode.com/hg/lib/andenginesvgtextureregionextension.jar

Best Regards,
Nicolas

I’ve been super lazy writing new blog posts on here for quite some time now, but today I’ll start to give you a weekly list of some awesome and successful games that were made with AndEngine.

Chalk Ball

Chalk Ball is a quite unique physics game, where you have to draw lines of chalk onto a board to prevent a ball from falling down to the bottom of the screen. It has been featured on the Android Market and on the Amazon Appstore and sports about 150.000 downloads.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlbrY4HDRcM

Farm Tower

Farm Tower is a cute and fun physics game for everybody from young to old. The mission is to remove all the blocks on screen, without letting the animals fall to the ground. It has been downloaded over 1.200.000 times and had nested in the Top #50 of all free Android games for quite a while.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-BfnfhcWF0

Wheelz

Wheelz is a very successful side-scrolling monster-truck physics game, that has been downloaded far over 1.000.000 times up to date. Wheelz was featured several times in the Android Market.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UexmVsAuduY

So with the right idea, the right skill and enough time you can create very(!) successful games with AndEngine.

Best Regards,
Nicolas

some days ago I started this mysterious thread in the forums that was like “New physics game – looking for testers”. Given the awesome feedback provided by about 20 members of the community, I could smooth some rough edges in my new game “Farm Tower” and also add new functionality. I have to say, thanks a lot guys, you are awesome

So 4 days ago I released Farm Tower version in the Android Market which has about 2000 downloads/day and is being rated over 4.3 in average.

Today I am releasing the “Pro Version” to the Android Market.

Following is a Gameplay-Video of Farm Tower:

And here you can find the Ecoand Full version in the market:

I also put up a website:

http://farmtower.andengine.org/

where screenshots etc can be downloaded – just in case you want to write a review or so .

Best Regards,
Nicolas

as the license-questions keeps popping up again and again let me clarify about AndEngine and the LGPL:

While AndEngine itself is licensed under the LGPL, you do NOT have to make your actual game-code available under the LGPL! The only thing you have to make available upon request are the changes you made to the Engine itself (which usually are none to very few!).

So I repeat here:
You do NOT have to make your actual game-code available under the LGPL!

This statement is official!

Best Regards,
Nicolas

the last days I had been in London enjoying the DroidCon 2010 (http://www.droidcon.co.uk/). I’m not asking why you all weren’t there … your fault

I probably don’t have to tell you that there were some great talks by fellow Androids but there also was a hackathon-app-contest ( http://openapiservice.com/droidcon-hackathon ) powered by Alcatel-Lucent. So the participating teams had to build an app around one or more of the OpenAPIServices and could submit their apps within (less than) 24 hours.

Guess which game engine was used by the winner …?

We had made a Live-Wallpaper called “BuddyRadar” in like 6-7 hours (also during some talks) that showed the position of your friends in a ‘submarine-style‘ radar. This is what it looked like. (Note the sandbox environment provides a couple of test-users and the locations of the test-users form some funny patterns ^^) (I uploaded a similar app that shows some of the world’s biggest citities in the same radar style here.)

BuddyRadar

So while I’m not sure (due to only having access to the Sandbox environment) if the OpenAPIServices are 100% ready for primetime, they are definitely worth a look!

Oh and additionally to the prize-money we won this amazing BladeRunner-style umbrella:

BaldeRunner-style Umbrella

All in all this were amazing days in London and you guys should consider coming to the next DroidCon too!

Best Regards,
Nicolas