The Battleships game for Motorola A008 (2001)

In 2001 I was offered to develop a mobile client-server game to show possibilities of the new GEX platform developed by a Swedish company called Gamefederation. I didn't have any strong experience in mobile development at that time because J2ME was actually new technology, but it looked very interestingly and I agreed the offer. The project was very time restricted and we (Russian team included 5 persons, also we have two very strong developers on the Swedish side) had only 3 months to develop the game (all its parts: the mobile client, the PC client and the game server based on the GEX). Unfortunately there were very poor development tools for J2ME in that time and the mobile phone (we had the Motorola A008 as the target device) was available only in the Stockholm Motorola's laboratory so we were made to develop the application blindly (but I can't say that it was the first case of such development as and not the last one). There were very two strong experienced Russian artists in our team - Vladimir Chernych and Dmitriy Holodov, they had very very very string experience in the PC game development field. As you can see below the PC client seems just wonderfully. The development process was built like Scrum.

The area of my responsibilities included: the entire mobile client, the network PC-client communication part and the game server. The GEX platform (it was very advanced technology at that time) was based on Java technology and games were presented on the server side as executing modules in bounds of a container (like EJB technologies). The PC client was entirely developed in C++ (we had two C++ developers for the PC game) and worked on Windows 98 under DeirectX but all network communications were working through my Java module which was called via JNI. The network protocol worked over HTTP.

It was no so easy to develop for the A008 because it had a touch-screen and I had to develop own small UI framework supports touch-screen to work with the possibility of the phone. Despite the difficulties, the project had been completed in time and shown on E3 2001. I dedn't see the game on a real device, only a few photos of the game process in a Swedish online magazine dedicated to mobile technologies..