keyboardsamurais.de

A while ago, I wrote a little Cellphone game based on an old game that a friend of mine had on his PDA and that has also been available on the Windows Platform for a while now. It is really fun to play and has highly addictive potential.

What kind of game is this?
It’s actually a small puzzle game. You can move a cursor across the screen and dissolve fields that have at least one neighbouring field with the same colour. If you dissolve fields, all fields above that position will fall down. However, there is a Highscore. For two contiguous fields the Score is 2, for 3 its 9, for 4 it’s 16 – you get the Idea. If there are no more neighbouring fields the game is over and your high score is saved.

How can I get Bubblet for my Cell phone?
Well, actually it’s free as in speech It’s licensed under the GPL. That means you get it for free, but (among other things) you are not allowed to make any Money out of it – unless you contact me for further licensing discussion.

The download link for the whole distribution (Binary and Source combined) is here:

bubblet_midp_dist__2004-09-21.zip
MD5 checksum: b195648be71425d57065d68c4870eac3

If you have Data services access on your cell phone (like GPRS, HSCSD, UMTS or the like) you can also download the game directly to your phone if you enter the following link (On Nokia phones you can enter this information under “Menu->Services->Go to address” – note that it won’t show up in the folder “Games”, you can find it in “Programs”)

http://keyboardsamurais.de/Bubblet.jad

Can my cell phone play this game too?
This is a very good question. In theory all cell phones should work, however platform portability on cell phones is tricky. If you have got a Nokia Phone chances are that you will not experience any trouble running it no matter what series or model. Some SonyEricsson Phones worked fine for me too (P800/900 although controls were quite hard to handle). As far as other manufacturers go – I wasn’t able to test any other than the above mentioned few. Please report back if you find, that your Cell phone does, or does not like this game and I will add it to my list.

Additional Information
I implemented only one game mode. In the original Bubblet there were much more options. But as this was only a proof-of-concept kind of thing I left the additional Game modes as an exercise for the inclined audience. Also, I didn’t clean the source as much as I should have cleaned it. I most sincerely apologize for all my sins

P.S.: A nice fellow j2me programmer, Alexander Sashnov, contacted me recently and provided fixes for some glitches in the original sourcecode. Since I currently don’t have a j2me environment available for binary packaging, I’m posting the diff file and the sourcecode he was so kind to send me:
bubblet_fixed.zip
bubblet_diff