One off the List: Dolphin Fun

Dolphin Fun is a simple side-scroller for Android I wrote with artistic direction given by my seven year old daughter. Game play is simple: eat fish without running out of air, and don’t get hit by the boat. Not terribly exciting, but a good programming exercise, and my daughter enjoyed seeing some of her ideas being implemented. If nothing else I have been able to show her one does not have to sit passively in front of our devices, simply consuming other people’s work. We can do our own thing.

In truth, I spent more time fussing with sprite sheets than writing code, but was able to cobble something together that has recognizable fish, boats, and a dolphin. The sprites are all from free game art sites, and sound effects from Sound Bible and elsewhere. The boats are from Shipbucket, which has some truly amazing illustrations of things that float.

Collision detection is primitive,  game play is somewhat clunky, and parts of the code are begging to be rewritten, so I guess I have to keep my day job. I’ve only scratched the surface of Android, but am looking forward to doing another app in the future, maybe an isometric something-or-other. If time allows, I will try to put it up into Jenkins and write some acceptance tests to run on a headless emulator.

There is an excellent tutorial here for anyone looking for a good place to start with Android.