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>> ANDRES: Hello. I'm Andres from Illusion Labs in Sweden. And we are creating games
and the fun applications for mobile devices, for mainly devices. We have created a game
called Labyrinth. It's actually a digital copy of the classic wooden game that we used
to play when we were kids where you tilt a plate to guide a steel bowl through a wooden
maze. And we made a digital version of that. We put a lot of effort into making the physics
feel rights. And, yeah, it has become quite popular. There's a free version on that on
the market today. And we found the game to be suitable for the Android G1 and G2 devices
because it has the accelerometer feature. It has a nice big display where you can display
the entire level at once. And we also think that the distribution channel is a great way
to distribute the application. It's easy to reach a lot of people through the markets.
And we believe that the volumes will be quite big, so we're looking into developing more
games and applications for the Android devices at this time. Okay. So, the company, we started
the company about two years ago. And the Labyrinth game was actually the first game we created
in the company. From the beginning, it was for the iPhone, and we started selling it
on the app store. It went very well. And after--and when we saw the Android phones coming out
on the market, we actually ported the application from the iPhone application. There was a few
differences there because the iPhone, we wrote most of the parts in C++, and for Android,
it's Java, of course. A lot of things, we could just copy and paste a lot of physics
calculation because the syntax is quite similar. So, the porting work wasn’t that hard actually.
We found it to be quite okay. And then, yeah, we have only the free version today on the
markets, but we will release a full version. And the full version, it contains about 1000
levels, all created by the community because we have also an online level editor that anyone
can access and create, very, very simply, create their own levels. It's actually built
on the App Engine using HTML 5 and the Canvas Tape. So, it's working very well. So we had
a couple of issues with accelerometer values at first because as we think they were filtered
before we could access the values. So, we actually had--have a good contact with some
of the Google guys and they helped us to get raw stream instead which it could use and
we could perform the filtering in our device instead of in the system. So, after a little
chat with some Google guys, we actually managed to get the feeling just right and that was
great. Another hard thing that we found was that since we are a Swedish-based company,
the G1 wasn’t sold in Sweden, so it was quite hard actually to get hold of a phone,
but we both went there on eBay from the U.S. So, yeah, so we got hold of them finally.
But still the simulator is quite good. But, of course, you cannot release something just
tested on the simulator, so we had to get a real phone. So when we created the application,
we had to get the feeling just right. We wanted to run the application in maximum frames per
second. That is 60 frames per second. So we had to do a lot of tweaks to get this going.
For example, we used OpenGL for rendering. And one thing that we did was to use Dirty
Rectangles. That means that we calculate which part of the application has actually moved,
has actually changed since the last frame, and we only we redraw those portions of the
screen. Another thing that we found out is using VBO. That's the buffered vertex, some
buffered texture coordinates and things like that and also the normals. They spent--they
actually made a huge difference in speed. So, a few frames per second we earned there.
So for the development environment, we really like working in Eclipse. We think it's a very
nice development environment and it's easy to debug. It's easy to--I mean, since we’re
using Java in the Android phone, it's really easy to create quality applications in quite
a short time. So that, we think that's really good. Okay. If you compare it to other devices
where you also you have a marketplace on the internet, we really like the--that is possible
to instantly publish your updates and your applications onto the store or onto the market.
And it's just a matter of minutes before it's accessible by other people. Another thing
that's good, that you can't do on, for example, the iPhone, it's the vibrator control. You
can have really, really fine vibrator control because what we use it for is for tactile
feedback in the game that when you tilt the device and when the ball bumps into the wall,
we actually turn on the vibrator just a little for a couple of milliseconds so it's just
starting up and then stopping again and that actually really feels like the ball is bumping
into the wall, and that makes a good feeling of the game.