Friday, March 25, 2011

Checkers for the Amazon Kindle

A couple of weeks ago, I received emails from two American programmers called Matt and Mike who planned to write a checkers program for the Amazon Kindle. I contributed my Java checkers engine (which also powers Checkers Tutor), and those two did all the rest in record time - and now Checkers is available from Amazon. For more information, check out the A gamz website or look at a video on YouTube!. I haven't ever seen the game live, but judging from what I can see, Matt and Mike have done a great job with it!

Monday, February 14, 2011

Checkers Tutor 2.1

I just posted Checkers Tutor 2.1 for Android on the Android market. It has a lot of improvements over the previous version:

  • Nicer graphics (see previous post)and new nicer launcher icon
  • A new pushover level where you should be able to win even when moving at random
  • A smoother transition of playing strength when moving up from beginner levels to depth-controlled levels to timed levels. This is done by disabling parts of the evaluation on the lower depth-controlled levels
  • The entire last game is restored now on startup, not only the last position
  • Two small bugs fixed
  • Behind the scenes, a lot of the code was cleaned up

To me, it looks as if it should be the best/nicest checkers app for the Android platform, but obviously I'm rather biased! Now all I need is some customers and some good ratings :-)

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Playing with graphics for Android checkers

Over the weekend, my wife went on a short hike with our kid and his godmother, giving me a bit of time to play around with the checkers tutor graphics. Here's my current preview, and I think I will leave it at that - I like the looks of it!



I increased the size of the pieces a bit, and used Inkscape to produce pieces with gradients and highlights. Obviously I'm not a graphic artist, but I think they are much nicer than the plain circles I used to have.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Android checkers reloaded

During my x-mas holidays, disappointed with the measly 5000 downloads I got over one year of my free Android Checkers Tutor App, I came up with a great plan: make it a paid app instead of free - like that, all the people who know nothing at all about checkers won't download it and won't complain about the must-capture-rule, and won't give it bad ratings. Great plan, but with 6 sales in 40 days, it didn't really work out... Not one to give up easily, I have decided to revamp it a bit. I've started making the code cleaner behind the scenes, and also tried to improve the looks of the app. Not too sure about whether it's an improvement - what do you think?