Coming soon - Star Falldown

Almost a year ago I started developing my first game for Android. It was a Falldown clone called Star Falldown. I decided yo use AndEngine to build the game.

Star Falldown

It's a simple game. You control a ball by tilting your phone. If the ball touches the top of the screen you lose. On your way down, to help you, there are three power ups:

• Timer - slows down the platforms
• Ghost - you go trough the platfroms
• 2x - you get double points

The game includes achievements and leaderboards powered by Google Play Game Services.

The game is in beta, if you want to test it you can use the this link but first make sure you are a member of the Android Beta Testers community.

If you have any suggestions, comments or ideas to make the game better leave a comment bellow or contact me on Google+.

Porting a Google Play app to the Amazon Store

Recently I worked on a project to port and Android app, created for Google Play, to the Amazon app store. It was a simple two-screen app that loaded text from a local database. It included ads (banner and interstitial), in-app purchase for removing the ads and push notifications.

First I uploaded the app to Amazon's app testing service. The only problem the testing service found was the In-App billing API. The suggestion was to use Amazon's In-App purchasing API.

Implementing the Amazon In-App purchasing API was pretty straightforward. Compared to Google's In-App billing API there is one more product type, Entitlement. It's used for something you buy once and own it, like the Remove Ads product for the app I was working on. The other main difference is when working with Amazon you have to worry about users. There can be multiple users using a single device and you have to take care of what products they own. There is a method callback with the current user ID.

The In-App purchasing library should not be added in the libs folder. It should be added in the Java Build Path as an external jar as the documentation suggest. To be continued....