Sea Turtle Rescue - Release

Well, the release date is drawing near.  Sea Turtle Rescue will be released to the App Store and the Play Store on November 20, 2019.

Sea Turtle Rescue is a puzzle game written in Smalltalk.  It features 244 levels of play divided into 9 series.

Your goal is to hatch the eggs (in the above level, there's an egg on the 5 tile) by making a sequence of connected tiles from the egg down to 1.  Once you've connected the sequence, the egg will hatch and the sea turtle will run down the path and be dropped into the ocean.

To help you solve the harder puzzles, you can use hammers, bombs and magnets.  Hammers allow you to nail tiles down so they don't move.  Bombs can blow up tiles that are in your way.  Magnets attract other tiles so they move together.

Sea Turtle Rescue runs on iPhones, iPads and Android devices and will be available on November 20.

Smalltalk contract work

Looking forward, I'll have some time available between now and the end of the year to take on other projects.  If anyone is interested in contracting some work to Simberon let me know.  Simberon specializes in Smalltalk software development (VisualWorks, ObjectStudio, VA Smalltalk and GemStone).  Services include:

• Version upgrades
• Custom software development
• Tracking down difficult bugs
• Mobile application development on Android and iOS in VisualWorks Smalltalk
• Instructor-led Training
• Introduction to Smalltalk
• Advanced VisualWorks Topics
• Design Patterns
• Improving Object Oriented Design

Contact me at info@simberon.com if there are any services you would like.

Sea Turtle Rescue

I've been a bit quiet about my game recently.  It's not because I'm not working on it - I am.  It's that I'm changing the game around so much that I have to get my head around it.

I'm in the process of transforming the game to a new theme and new title.  I've hired an animator and graphics artist to do artwork for me.

The new game will be "Sea Turtle Rescue". The goal of each level of the game is to hatch sea turtle eggs and guide the sea turtles into the ocean.  The basic mechanics will be the same as HexSolve but the graphics and animation will all change.

Tiles in the board will become tiles covered with sand.  The target will become a sea turtle egg.  When you make a sequence (a path) from 1 up to the tile with the egg, the egg will hatch and a sea turtle will emerge.  The sea turtle will shuffle down the path you built (in reverse order: eg. 4, 3, 2, 1) until it gets to the 1 tile where it will drop into the ocean below.

I'll be adding sound and music to the game to add an extra ambiance.

I like the new theme much more than the strict mechanical puzzle theme of HexSolve.  It gives a nice purpose for the game and an interesting theme.  I'll try to keep you posted as we make progress.

Native development of mobile games

When I tell people that I'm developing mobile games in VisualWorks Smalltalk, they often look at me quizzically and ask why. It's hard to explain the advantages of using Smalltalk when the game needs to run on a mobile device with only a serial interface connected to my own low-level debugger.

I've now broken through that barrier. I can now run the code natively in a VisualWorks development environment.

This is my game running inside a VisualWorks window on a Windows 10 laptop. The Smalltalk code is virtually identical to the Smalltalk code that runs on the mobile device. The only differences are in the low-level interfaces to the file system, the FreeType library and OpenGL.

This is a game changer for me. I now have access to the full Smalltalk development environment including the inspectors, the debugger, condition breakpoints and the ability to change code while the game is running.

Now I feel like my decision to use Smalltalk will pay off in spades.

HexSolve Puzzle Game

Your challenge is to slide tiles around a hexagonal board and create numbered chains. End the chain with target tiles to advance to the next level.  Make chains too early and you can get stuck.  With over 200 levels from Easy to Wicked, you will find this game challenging yet satisfying.  How far can you get before you meet your match?

Available on the App Store and on Google Play.

For more details, visit http://www.simberon.com/HexSolve

HexSolve Puzzle Game for iOS and Android

Simberon is proud to announce the release of the HexSolve Puzzle Game for iOS and Android.  You can download them on the App Store and on Google Play.

HexSolve challenges you to create chains of tiles on order to make special "target" tiles advance. As you swipe the screen in one of 6 directions (left, right, up-left, up-right, down-left and down-right), all of the free tiles will move as far as they can in that direction.

At the end of the swipe, and chains of consecutive numbers starting at 1 are "combined". All the tiles except the highest number are removed and the highest number tile is advanced.  If that tile was a target tile, the target is removed.

You finish the level when there are no more target tiles left on the board.



After the Tutorial level which guides you through the game's rules, you'll advance to higher levels including Easy, Challenging, Tough, Hard and Wicked.

You can play the game from start to end without making any purchases.  In that case, you'll have a limited number of restarts per hour and you'll receive ads occasionally.  If you want to eliminate the ads, get hints on how to solve levels, or get unlimited restarts, you can purchase those options from the Shop.

Download it now and have fun.  If you can solve any Wicked level on your own, let me know.  Those levels are really hard.

I'd love to hear any feedback you have by e-mailing hexsolve@simberon.com.

Mobile Smalltalk

I've been announcing the Open Beta release of my game HexSolve for Android and iOS.  HexSolve was written in Smalltalk and people have been asking me how it's possible to run Smalltalk on mobile devices.  I thought I'd write up a little description of the technology behind it.

I've wanted to be able to run Smalltalk on Android and iOS for many years.  I finally decided to do something about it.  I chose VisualWorks for my development environment.  Unfortunately iOS doesn't support dynamic compilation so getting the regular VisualWorks VM to run on iOS is virtually impossible.  I decided to skirt around the issue by writing my own VM.

My VM is written in C.  It interprets the same bytecodes as those generated by VisualWorks so I can use the VisualWorks compiler to compile all of the code for the mobile Smalltalk.  Being a pure interpreter, I get around the problem of dynamic compilation on iOS.  Apple is okay with an interpreter so long as all of the code it's interpreting is delivered with the product and not downloaded dynamically.

Development of the Smalltalk code begins in VisualWorks.  I have my own Object class (in my own namespace) as well as my own copies of the other base classes (True, False, UndefinedObject, etc.).  I did this because I had better control of the implementation than I would if I just used the VisualWorks base code.  If I used the regular VisualWorks classes, then I would need to bring in more and more of the base code to get those classes to work.  There are just too many "strings attached" to do this effectively.

Methods beginning with an underscore ($_) will have the underscore removed when moving the image to the mobile device.  It allows me to have one version for Mobile Smalltalk and a different version for VisualWorks.  You can imagine that it would be bad if I re-defined at:put: in VisualWorks.

I have an ImageBuilder utility that takes all of the code in the packages "SimTalk Remote Core" (base Smalltalk code) and "SimTalk HexSolve" (the game itself), packages them into a special 64-bit image format and writes the image into a file.  I can then use AndroidStudio or XCode to include this image as an asset to deliver to the device along with the interpreter.

The interpreter itself is a 64 bit image.  It uses immediate objects (tagged objects that fit within the object pointer) for SmallInteger, Character and Float.  This allows me to do faster operations on these objects without allocating memory.

The game uses Smalltalk primitives to interface to OpenGL ES which runs on both Android and iOS. For text, I interface to Freetype which is compiled and delivered with the game.  Freetype will create images for the characters which I can collect and cache in a Smalltalk Image object.  I then render these images as OpenGL textures.

My mobile Smalltalk is single-threaded - there's no such thing as fork, a Process or a ProcessManager.  In fact, Smalltalk runs completely as an OS callback.  When the OS determines that something happened (a touch event, a button or a timeout), it runs a callback in my VM.  The VM creates an Event object, drops it into a known spot in the image and runs the interpreter.  The interpreter then reads the event, dispatches it, re-renders the screen if necessary then calls suspend which returns from the OS callback.  Nothing more happens until the next OS callback.

Some people have asked me when I'll release this technology so they can use it.  I'm sorry to say, but I don't intend to do that.  This is for internal use for me to write Smalltalk code for Android and iOS.  I have several problems if I try to commercialize the development technology:

1. You can't develop code in this environment without a VisualWorks license.  I have such a license with Cincom but it's hard to tell other developers that they need a license for VisualWorks plus a license for my mobile development environment and it's hard to enforce.
2. I've implemented interfaces to API's I need in the OS but not to everything.  Other developers would need probably access to accelerometers, GPS, Internet, cameras and other things.  I can't have a good commercial product without those interfaces and it's too much work to write these interfaces on speculation.
3. Too many companies have died trying to provide tools for developers to enhance Smalltalk environments.  The market isn't big enough to justify the effort.
4. To be honest, software developers make lousy customers.  They tend to be very demanding on everything they need and usually don't like paying money for what they get.  They're used to software development environments being free and open source and don't want to pay for development and maintenance of their toolset.
5. I'd rather create fun profitable games than creating development environments for other people to use to create fun profitable games.

The graphics for HexSolve were all rendered using POV-Ray.

I hope that answers most of your questions.  Happy Smalltalking.