Lately I’ve been tinkering around with the development kit for my new phone. It’s an Android phone, if you didn’t deduce that from the title of this post. In the past few days I’ve just done some very basic form stuff, learning about layouts, XML view definitions, creating custom views, and interactions between “activities” which are basically sub-applications within an application package you’d download off the Marketplace, or what have you.

My first application, which will be on the Marketplace when I get around to signing up for a developer’s key, is a Dungeons and Dragons style dice rolling app, where you can type in a dice roll string (e.g. 2d10+4d6) and it will show you the rolls. I’m aware that this has “been done” and it’s not the most complex app, but I made it to learn, and it served its purpose.

My new project, which will be the new focus of this blog, will be much more interesting. Not the blog posts – those will be mostly nerdy stuff, but the final application should be fun. It’ll be a top down dungeon crawler – a roguelike, if you’re familiar with the genre. If you’re unfamiliar, think a simplified Zelda with randomized maps and items to provide infinite replayability.

Links to the pages:

• Day 1: Let’s do some graphics.
• Day 2: Let’s draw a map.
• Day 3: Let’s make the map larger.
• Day 4: Let’s clean up the code.
• Day 5: Let’s add new forms of input.
• Day 6: Let’s improve the touch control.
• Day 8: Let’s kill some enemies.
• Day 10: Let’s save our game.
• Day 13: Enemies should not run into walls.
• Day 16(?): Quick update.
• Day 21: Inventory screen.