10 marca, 2011

Double Balance game for Android


Test your skill and patience in Double Balance, a new game by Borza Industries.

Tilt your phone left and right to move the in-game platforms and prevent blue and red balls from falling out of the screen. The game is easy to learn and tough to master.

It's for kids, casual and hardcore gamers, as it features 5 distinct difficulty settings. Each round usually takes less than a minute, so it's a perfect game to play whenever you have some time to kill.

The game graphics are simple, with hand-drawn backgrounds, or, if you like, computer generated backgrounds with infinite possibilities.

Submit your scores to online leaderboards to compare your score with your friends. There are daily, weekly, monthly and yearly boards, and you can try to get the #1 place at all of them.

The game features 11 achievements, try to unlock them all,  when you have truly mastered the game. Some are really hard to get.

Screenshots:

The game has drawn and generated backgrounds
Leaderboards are available for each one of the five difficulty settings in game, and there are separate boards for the current day, week, month and year.


11 achievements to unlock, some easy, some hard.

02 marca, 2011

BorzaTV dev talk - More than 500 users!

Hello, we've surpassed 500 registered users in BorzaTV tracker.

We've started this app as something small, personal (and it still is), but hundreds of registered users are a good sign.

Maybe somebody would be interested in the inner workings of the app.

BorzaTV is composed of two parts - the Android application, written in Java and a Python backend. The backend and database runs on Google AppEngine, a great free platform for hosting a web service / web app. Android app communicates with the server through compressed JSON, which leads to very small  transfer sizes for show/episode list or the show finder. The Android app caches the JSON responses on SD card, so for example episode lists are kept for several days and don't need to be fetched from the server so often.

The backed is being continually updated and fixed, and thanks to the high productivity Python offers, it's easy.

Of course, the Android app is still not perfect, so we'll issue updates every 2-4 weeks to add new features and fix bugs.

Among the new features that will be added are "TOP 100 list" of shows, based on preferences of the users. It wasn't meaningful to be included from the start of the app, because the TOP 100 list would be empty by then. Now, with 500 users and about 1000 shows watched by users it is possible. Based on the stats off the top of our head, the leaders would be Family Guy, How I Met Your Mother, Glee, House and The Walking Dead!