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FEBRUARY 12TH, 2013

Water, water everywhere!

Image

In our sequel to Sprinkle we are introducing water in a whole new way: pools, ponds and even oceans of it! You’ll be able to travel between islands on a raft, extinguish burning objects by pushing them into the water and solve puzzles with objects that either sink or float!

Mediocre games says Sprinkle's successor will feature islands » AndroidPure
February 12, 2013 at 3:49 pm

[...] via Mediocre blog. [...]

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Davi Paula
February 12, 2013 at 7:56 pm

If the game does not get too heavy fine because my tablet does not handle very heavy game

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koayekyu
February 16, 2013 at 9:24 am

I want to play continue this game

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Dexter
June 19, 2013 at 3:28 pm

When it comming ?

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EricE
June 29, 2013 at 1:11 am

Have you guys ever thought about adding replay to your games. Could be a cool feature.

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JANUARY 8TH, 2013

Back to work

storyboard

It feels great to be back working after the holidays! Here is a glance at a rough sketch for the storyboard to the intro (for our sequel to Sprinkle). Can you guess the story?

Hope everyone are having an amazing 2013 so far!

Katy
January 8, 2013 at 1:39 pm

Can’t wait! Love your games!

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Eddy
January 11, 2013 at 7:35 pm

When will the sequel be done by? Can’t wait too long for it….

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mediocregames
January 21, 2013 at 10:16 am

We don’t have an official release date yet, keep an eye on our blog and facebook page for more info!

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arman25
January 14, 2013 at 4:02 pm

hi
is it safe to buy your games on iranian Bazar?

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mediocregames
January 21, 2013 at 10:08 am

Hi! Yes it is! :)

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Abhedya
January 24, 2013 at 6:45 am

HI ….
You guys are the best ….
Your Every Game rocks …
Pls make it soon … Can’t Wait ..
I will buy It immediately .

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OCTOBER 25TH, 2012

The making of Granny Smith

Dennis has written two technical articles about the development of Granny Smith, you can find them on his blog:

The Physics of an Old Lady

How Granny Got the Look

 

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SEPTEMBER 27TH, 2012

Ten things you didn’t know about Granny Smith

1) The main inspiration for the game was the intro sequence to the “Naked Gun” movies with Leslie Nielsen.

 

2) The working title of the game was “Rollo”, named after a Swedish candy. The folder in our main game repository is still called rollo.

Rollo candy

3) The game objective of collecting three apples before the thief was unknowingly invented by Jon Jordan at PocketGamer. We showed the game to PocketGamer at the Nordic Game Conference, and based on a misunderstanding, Jon wrote an article about how he thought the game worked. When we read his article we first went – doh, he got it all wrong! Then we went – hmm, his idea is actually more fun than ours, let’s change it! We still haven’t told Jon about this.

4) The voice actor for Granny is also a talented illustrator.

5) The main character was first an old man called Mr Rollins.

6) The soda machine in some of the city levels has a sticker that says “More molecules” as a tribute to the movie Idiocracy.

7) Even though the game only has two buttons, we spent a whole month trying out different control schemes before we settled on the current one. Some of them included the tilt sensor and a button for rotating backwards.

8) The Panda at the Zoo level is a tribute to Henrik’s girlfriend Hanna, based on a nickname he has for her.

9) The building textures in the city levels are mostly made out of photos from San Francisco, where Dennis lived for some time before Mediocre existed.

10) The Stanley character is based on a man called Sten, well-known in the Swedish games industry for organizing great parties at game development conferences.

10 Hal Yang Tidak Kamu Ketahui Tentang Game Granny Smith | GameSaku
October 4, 2012 at 8:52 am

[...] via Mediocre [...]

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Candela
March 4, 2013 at 11:45 am

Congratulations, Henrik, this is a great work!
Kisses from Barcelona,
Candela

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サングラス
August 13, 2013 at 6:28 am

サングラス

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Laura Kelly
July 5, 2014 at 9:35 am

It’s a nice one. Kids really like it. Thanks for sharing. New Release !! Lets see this game “City Cleaner” for kids. Also FREE to download from Google Play..!! so download it & give rating.!

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Daniel
February 9, 2016 at 9:14 am

What is Henrik’s score in Granny Smith?

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Mediocre Moderator
February 11, 2016 at 10:35 am

Hi Daniel,
I’ll ask him! What’s yours?

Cheers,
Emil

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SEPTEMBER 15TH, 2012

Granny Smith Arcade Machine

For the Granny Smith release party, I wanted to make an old school arcade machine, and since the game is controlled with virtual buttons it should make a nice experience to play it with physical buttons. My initial idea was to build it from an old discarded radio or tv, but it was hard to find to find an appropriate cabinet.

After putting up some shelves in the kitchen I had this masonite board and some small pieces of wood laying around, and it turned out to be exactly what I needed. I sketched out the pieces directly with a pen and then used a regular jigsaw to cut it. I should maybe have used proper screws to assemble it, but I was lazy and did it with nails instead. It actually turned out more sturdy than I thought it would.

The idea was to suspend a tablet on inside to act as screen and for running the game. It took some tweaking to get the height of it right and find a way to easily remove the tablet if needed without disassembling the whole device. Below is the final setup, which also leaves room for connecting the charger at the bottom of the tablet. The tablet is an Asus Transformer TF300T.

The controls was my biggest headache for the project and I was researching different ways of mechanically translating a button press into touch directly on the screen. Apparently, anti-static socks use silver thread, and they can double as the tip of a touch stylus. I never got further than that fortunately, because I came to think of a little toy from the goodie bag of this year’s Game Developers Conference – a Zeemote wireless joystick. Connecting that to an Android tablet and hook up the buttons to the joystick should do the trick.

I ordered real arcade buttons from DealExtreme. They feel and look exactly as cheap as they are ($7 for four buttons, including shipping), but only two of the four I ordered actually worked. I wanted four buttons to also allow throwing baseballs and bananas, so I complemented the arcade buttons with more sturdy metal buttons bought locally. They don’t feel like arcade buttons, but are way more reliable. Perhaps the trickiest part of the whole project was to solder wires from the buttons onto the Zeemote. Anyone who have seen a Zeemote know it is extremely tiny. Now imagine opening this device and soldering cables directly onto the circuit board. I didn’t get it right the first time, and I was more than once convinced I would ruin it, but eventually I got all the wires in place, and it has worked ever since.

Controlling the tablet with a Zeemote is done using the Zeemote SDK, available to developers for free. Now I would say I’m a fairly experienced game developer and I have never in my career seen a more complicated API for something as simple as reading input from a joystick. Seriously, it should be three or four functions at most, but the Zeemote SDK somehow manages to present this in an API with tons of classes and methods, even suggesting that you base your whole game around their sample framework! I refused to use something that silly and started looking for alternatives. Fortunately there is a little Android app called USB/BT Joystick Center 6 that is totally awesome. It lets you hook up any USB or bluetooth joystick and map the input to key strokes, button pressed or even touch input. I hooked it up and it worked instantly!

Now all the pieces were in place, so I painted the cabinet black and printed stickers for the front and sides. Voila, the Granny Smith arcade machine. /Dennis

Making an old-school arcade machine with an Android tablet | Green Rom Project – News
September 15, 2012 at 8:21 pm

[...] Pad TF300T, some arcade buttons and a Zeemote bluetooth controller. Go ahead and check out Mediocre’s blog to see more about the process and details. It took a bit of work and money to put it all together, [...]

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Making an old-school arcade machine with an Android tablet | Android Tablets
September 16, 2012 at 2:33 pm

[...] Pad TF300T, some arcade buttons and a Zeemote bluetooth controller. Go ahead and check out Mediocre’s blog to see more about the process and details. It took a bit of work and money to put it all together, [...]

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Making an old-school arcade machine with an Android tablet | iniphones.com
September 17, 2012 at 6:28 am

[...] little colonnade buttons as well as a Zeemote bluetooth controller. Go forward as well as check out Mediocre’s blog to see some-more about a routine as well as details. It took a bit of work as well as income to put [...]

Reply 
Zeemote (@Zeemote)
September 17, 2012 at 11:55 pm

Hey Dennis – got a kick reading this. Thanks for posting! – Iris @ Zeemote

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como crear una máquina arcade clásica con una tableta Android | Android Cafe
September 18, 2012 at 1:50 pm

[...] arcade en tu casa. Si quieren seguir paso a paso la realización de ésta frikada, pueden pasar por el blog de su autor. Comparte éste post:Artículos que pueden interesarte también:Motorola comienza a mudar a [...]

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Developer constructs Granny Smith arcade machine in preparation for official launch party | TalkAndroid.com
September 19, 2012 at 11:48 pm

[...] Source: MediocreGames [...]

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Developer constructs Granny Smith arcade machine in preparation for official launch party | Gadgets Tech Tips News
September 20, 2012 at 1:01 am

[...] Source: MediocreGames [...]

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Developer constructs Granny Smith arcade machine in preparation for official launch party | John Ryan Lee
September 20, 2012 at 5:12 am

[...] Source: MediocreGames [...]

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Developer constructs Granny Smith arcade machine in preparation for official launch party - Google Truth And Rumors
September 20, 2012 at 7:41 am

[...] Source: MediocreGames [...]

Reply 
Ograf
September 27, 2012 at 12:52 pm

Nice!! please can you tell me what is the engine used in granny smith game :)

thanks

Reply 
mediocregames
September 27, 2012 at 1:13 pm

Hi, we have built most of the technology in-house, so it does not use an off-the-shelf game engine.

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How can I build an arcade cabinet for my android - Android Forums
July 25, 2013 at 7:59 am

[...] own design for it. I have a Nexus 7, and I was thinking of building the cabinet based off this one: Granny Smith Arcade Machine | Mediocre blog how as a no experience hardware assembler would go about [...]

Reply 
Ron
January 14, 2015 at 3:51 pm

USB/BT Joystick Center 6 is no longer available on the Play Store. Is there any alternative? Another question: When remapping the keys, do I need to do the same remapping on the other devices I want to use the device on?

Reply 
Mediocre Moderator
January 15, 2015 at 12:40 pm

Hello Ron, could you please drop an email to our support and we’ll do our best to help you out on the issue. The address is: support @ mediocre . se (without all the blanks). Thank you!

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