Two weeks ago I was participating at the 10th Game Jolt Contest, where we had to create a computer game around the theme Party within 9 days.

This was my first development contest and at the beginning I had no idea what game I should make. The only two things I knew where the contest theme and that it had to be a 3d game (my personal requirement). While brainstorming around, the song Party Rock didn't get out of my head. That was my biggest inspiration, although that song has nothing to do with 70s (and 80s) Disco - that part came by accident.

Disco was a very interesting topic and I learned much about this era by reading different articles, listening to Soul and Disco music (e.g. Bee Gees, The Three Degree) and watching Travolta taking over the Disco floor. At first I hoped, the game direction would not be too far away from the primary theme, but later on it didn't matter anymore.

The result was the game Disco Rock, an extremely simple arcade game where you roll through the disco and smash as many beverages as possible, avoid holes in the dance floor, jump around, make combos, and climb to the top of the highscore - nothing big, a game for around 15 minutes to play, maybe even less. I had much more planned for it (power-ups, other obstacles), but I ran out of time and I also wanted to focus more on the technical side of the whole development process.

I'm still proud that I was able to make such a game within that short period of time and with my own
C++ engine, and it was very interesting to learn about different problems when working to a specific deadline with just a handful of ideas and not a well designed project plan.

The game is exclusively available on Game Jolt, you can use a guest name to submit your score and time on the leaderboard, or login with an existing account.

It requires no installation and is freeware. If you have any problems, feel free to contact me.

- Martin

After hacking around for a bit, I was finally able to integrate everything into the Core Engine which is necessary for Android development. The only additional tools required are the Android SDK and NDK, the JDK and Ant.

Using SDL for this was a great help, everything important like setting up video output, forwarding log messages, getting touch events, using threads and much more is already handled by the library. I can really recommend it when developing Android games with C/C++.

I still need to fix some stuff using various OpenGL extensions and the shared context implementation, but the basic output is stable without affecting performance or quality of the Windows and Linux build.

Of course the engine uses OpenGL ES 2.0 (programmable) when building for Android, which is a bit more restrictive (fixed-function API completely eradicated), but it offers much greater performance, flexibility and compatibility with its next version and the desktop implementation. This also forced me to remove all remaining deprecated functions from the engine, which is good.

I hope I can start a new game with this framework soon, though there is still Project One, but I don't know if I will continue it. I learned much through its creation, but barely received feedback, and maybe this means I have to go on and try something different - not walking on the same spot the whole time.

- Martin