The Battleships game for Motorola A008 (2001)

The title
    In 2001 I was offered to develop a mobile client-server game to show possibilities of the GEX platform developed by the Gamefederation company. I didn't have any strong experience in mobile development at that time but it looked very interestingly and I agreed that.The project was very time restricted and we (I was participated at the team which included 6 persons) had only 3 months to develop the game (both the mobile client and the PC client, also a game server based on the GEX). Unfortunately there were very poor development tools for J2ME in that time and  the mobile phone (we used  the Motorola A008 as the target device) was available only in the Stockholm Motorola's laboratory so I was made to develop the application blindly (but I can't say that it was the first case of such development and the last one). There were very strong experienced artists - Vladimir Chernych and Dmitriy Holodov in our team, they had a lot of experience in the PC game development area by that time. As you can see below the PC client seems just wonderfully
the PC client screen
    I was responsible for development of all Java and J2ME based parts of the project, because the GEX platform used Java based modules which were written with its API and the game server was a  GEX component which worked in the server container (like EJB). The PC client was developed in C++ (we had two C++ developers for the PC game) and I developed a Java based part for it to work with the server through HTTP. The Java part of the PC client worked with the native game code through JNI.
    I was only who developed the mobile client for the game and because I didn't have a special artist to make pixelart graphics for the mobile client I developed both the interface and the images by myself but I partially used graphics from the PC client
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   It was no so easy to develop for the A008 because it had a touch-screen and I was made to develop own small UI framework to work with the possibility of the phone. Despite the difficulties, the project had been completed in time and shown on E3 2001. Unfortunately I have never seen the game on a real device, only a few photos of the game process in a Swedish online magazine about mobile technologies.. 



(C) 2009 Igor Maznitsa http://www.igormaznitsa.com