Hi,
After 2 months containment in WIP zone I present my game. The game shows the fight between the military forces of ATU and KEMI corporations through the Solar System as far as the Earth.
Description
The Collapse: Space Supremacy is a 2D real time spaceship simulator with elements of a turn based strategy.
To finish the game you must complete 3 campaigns: The Belt (the outer limits of the Solar System), The Mars and The Earth.
Real time space battle is carried out in a ‘one on one’ mode in newtonian physics environment which makes the steering quite natural and difficult at the same time.
You must not only control the battle, but also keep an eye on power, weapon, navigation and steering systems.
Platform
Android (>=4.0) for sure
Features
3 independent campaigns.
Languages: English and Polish
Here is a boot sequence of information service which will provide information during the game. As many can tell it resembles the boot sequence of the Mother main frame from Nostromo (Alien).
Also a specification of a spaceship - ATU destroyer class. I don’t know if it ends up in the game as it grows too big to be honest.
I have to say sorry for such a delay in posting, but I am not to be blamed. Publishing the application on Google Play took me over 4 weeks (21 Dec-20 Jan). And there was no errors. It was a normal publishing process. I do not know reasons for the delay. I did not get any info from Google Support, although I wrote to them on this matter. Yes, I was angry. If someone also waits so long, I advise only patience, because after a month the app has been published without any explanation. Anyway, I also published in the Amazon Store. This process took only four days, but also had an idiotic twist.
Below are links to the stores
Google Play
Amazon Store
I hope you will enjoy it.
The most problematic in the development was the setting up of an advertising system, which I did actually only for testing. If anyone would like to get detailed instructions on how to install Admob libraries for LibGdx, please just drop me a line, because I know it’s a big pain the in the ass.
Four weeks is definitely not normal for Google Play. AFAIK there’s hardly any review process at all, you just create a new app and fill in all the boxes it tells you to. But I haven’t published an app lately, so it might be a recent problem, or it might be related to the particular settings for your app.
AdMob is a Google API and Google APIs are nearly always bad. Over-engineered, confusing, and inefficient; that’s the baseline each Google library starts from, then it adds its own gunk on top. In terms of "Why?!"s per minute, Google APIs are at the very top. The simplest use case shown in the tutorial is trivial; the most common use case requires a third-party library (unsupported by Google but used in their tutorials) and the use of a deprecated flag that does what you want. So why is this super-useful flag deprecated? Some lightbulb found a 5x more verbose solution requiring another API and a listener class.
Compared to the no-nonsense, straight-to-the-point API of LibGDX, using AdMob, Google Play, and Google Maps, has been nothing but frustration.
Well, it used to be like that. Few hours or even minutes and your app was up. Not anymore. I didn’t change any settings. I left everything as it was. I think they have introduced some rating system like PEGI or whatever it is called. And it is done by real people. It might concern only games. Anyway I don’t want to kill anyone anymore, but the worst part was an absolute lack of feedback. Both from the console (there was no estimated release date) nor from the support. I contacted them by an email twice and I received email saying something like “We will check what is going on but we will answer you only if we have any information”. So no even simple “Sorry, this process takes time, even a month. Be patient”. Also, I checked their chat. Yup, totally a bot. Also completely useless. Waste of time.
The most problematic thing was that 90% of tutorials on Admob for LibGDX is obsolete. Like a year ago Google messed up its Ad libs located in Android SDK folder. There used to be one jar. Now the same jar got scattered in dozens of jars (they are not even jars anymore). So you need to guess which jar to input. Also there is no tutorials on it. It took me 3 very loooooong days to come up with something, but it works quite fine now.
In general it was quite flawless. The very developer console is very neat and well designed. On the other hand Google’s console is one big mess. On Amazon everything is numbered so you just follow the instrucions. The only worse thing is that you need to delete the old binary when you update, where on Google it’s done automatically.
Ok, and now about the twist. Actually Amazon wasn’t as nice as I presented it. The whole process starts with uploading of the apk (it doesn’t need to be signed like on Google). Once you do it they will tell you if the APK file is ok (it’s actually not the proper verifcation process). In my case I lacked android:versionName and android:versionCode in AndroidManifest.xml. I didn’t know I had to include it, but I fixed it and the APK was accepted. Then you create new app in the Developer Dashboard. It’s easy, but the browser session is very short. I had to relogin 3 times and lost some progress. So remember to save. Once I finished it I pressed Submit button and waited for verications. The best part was that they gave me estimated time when it will be published. It was within 24 hours or so. I need to mention that before I created an account on Amazon my biggest concern was if I could use Admob libs on Amazon Store. Technically it’s independent company but practically it’s Google, so you may imagine that Amazon might not be very happy about that. I browsed many forums about it and half of people said it’s ok and it will work and the second half said it will not work as Admob uses some internal Android libs and Amazon system is not proper Android. Anyway I risked and included Admob. So, let’s get back to publishing process. I submitted it for verification. Few hours later I received an email in which they basically said that they don’t allow Admob. Well, I was ok with that. It’s their store. So I just shrugged my shoulders and even wanted to delete the unpublished app from the Console. There was no such button though. I decided to abandon the account. And now the twist. After 4 days boom - I receive an email “Your recent submission was successfully published and is now LIVE on Amazon Appstore. A quick summary is published below:…”. So you may guess I was all like WTF!!!. Everything worked. The app was active. It even managed to update it 3 times. The adds are working too.
In general wnen it comes to Amazon the pros are better console, better publishing process and the price - it’s free. The con is one. It’s quite small market. Don’t expect anything from it.
PS. I tried to publish to Samsung Store (it’s actually called Galaxy store). It’s a story for another long post but right now I will just ask you to imagine all above mentioned problems multplied by 10 and everything finished with a failure. It’s was just ridiculous.
