Personalized Mobile Games

You get to create your own free custom mobile Java game with images you upload from your computer. The game is a shooting game witten using Java Micro edition and the website makes it really easy to create your game using a 3 step wizard or a 5 step advanced wizard. It requires no knowledge of any kind of coding at all.
You either can download the game directly to your wap enabled phone or by email to yourself or to a friend.

Pac-Man Returns to Mobile - Bigger and Better

The old time favourite game Pac-Man is getting a face lift and even a 'Super' in front of his name by Namco to keep up with the times.
The new version has given him new moves and a lot more surprises can be expected.
He is first to be unleashed in the US then to the rest of the world.

Gamevil Moves To USA

Gamevil has opened a US subsidiary in Los Angeles. These are the guys who developed Skipping Stone, which is published by iPlay and has won several awards. From the press release:
“The company’s portfolio emphasizes easily accessible casual and networked games, all of which are based on bleeding-edge technologies. One such technology is GAMEVIL LIVE, a scalable, user-friendly network gaming service that will bridge new gamers to existing carrier communities…Along with great games and novel technologies, GAMEVIL USA will also bring GAMEVIL’s winning business strategy to the United States. GAMEVIL is a marketing leader in Korea, where it has pioneered direct-to-consumer and community-based promotions.”
Gamevil plans to use the same marketing techniques in the US, which should be a good thing — many people think that distribution is one of the biggest problems with the US (and most of the world’s) mobile gaming market.

G-Mode Coming to the US via Namco

Japanese game developer G-Mode has announced it has selected Namco as it's US partner. The deal will see Namco distributing G-Mode's games through the US.

"With Namco Networks being a major mobile content provider in North America, offering such games as PAC-MAN(R) and Dig Dug(R), this pairing should prove to be impressive in terms of technology, development and market expansion," said Takeshi Miyaji, President and CEO of G-Mode.

Constructing a Mobile Game Skeleton

You will learn here how to build a very simple MIDlet called Skeleton that displays information about the mobile phone as lines of text onscreen. Understanding and building upon this sample MIDlet will allow you to code even more complex games.

Exploring the J2ME APIs

Before getting into the coding details of your first mobile phone program, you need a quick primer on the APIs that go into building MIDlets. The MIDP (Mobile Information Device Profile) specification is a set of rules that describe the capabilities and limitations of Java with respect to mobile devices. A significant aspect of these capabilities and limitations is the standard set of classes and interfaces that are available for MIDlet programming. Although the MIDP specification provides a detailed description of the API available for MIDlet development, an additional API is provided by the CLDC (Connected Limited Device Configuration). The MIDP API builds on the CLDC API to provide classes and interfaces that are more specific to mobile information devices. You can think of the CLDC as providing a general Java API for networked devices, whereas the MIDP goes a step further in providing a more detailed API that fills in the specifics left out of the CLDC API for compact wireless devices such as phones and pagers.

Why should you care about any of these specifications and APIs? The CLDC and MIDP specifications are important because they explicitly define what classes and interfaces can be used to build MIDlets. Mobile devices are nimble machines that don't have the luxury of megabytes of memory to pack full of application overhead. Knowing this, Sun had to figure out a way to provide a core set of functionality with a useful feature set but without bloating the runtime requirements of mobile devices. Their answer is the two-tier approach that consists of a configuration layered with a more detailed profile. The CLDC API describes the core classes and interfaces required by a general network device, whereas the MIDP API adds the classes and interfaces required by a mobile information device such as a mobile phone

Keep in mind that although the CLDC and MIDP APIs have been carefully thought out to trade off functionality against the memory and resource constraints of mobile devices, they will inevitably come up short in certain situations. This means that you will sometimes have to work a little harder as a MIDlet game developer because you don't have as rich an API to work with as you would if you were doing traditional game programming.

The CLDC API

The majority of the classes in the CLDC API are directly included from the standard J2SE API. These classes and interfaces are practically identical to those that you may be familiar with from traditional Java programming. This portion of the CLDC API is located in packages with familiar J2SE names such as java.lang and java.util. In addition to the classes and interfaces that are borrowed directly from the J2SE API, a few interfaces are unique to the CLDC API. These interfaces deal primarily with networking, which is an area of the J2SE API that is particularly difficult to scale down for the needs of network devices.

The CLDC defines a set of interfaces that facilitate generic networking, and leaves the specifics of implementing these interfaces to the MIDP API. So the CLDC API is logically divided into two parts:

• A series of packages that serve as a subset of the J2SE API

• A set of generic networking interfaces

The bulk of the classes and interfaces in the CLDC API are inherited directly from the J2SE API. J2ME requires that any classes or interfaces inherited directly from J2SE must not be changed in any way, which means that the methods and fields are identical to the versions found in J2SE. This makes it easier to learn how to program in J2ME, and it also makes Java code more portable between J2SE and J2ME.

Games you say ?

Mobile Game Developer is a site started at July 2004 and aims to provide a base site for game developers working in the mobile/wireless industry. They consentrate on original features and content, as well as developers resources such as the devices directory, forums and links to other relevent pages around the web which are of interest to developers. They touch the business side but do not target senior executives. This site is first a place for the technical guys that make the mobile games work. The site is based on community work more then on dictated content. And most important - they are all developers working in the industry themselves.

A Must Nokia Development

If you are serious about developing anything for any Nokia phone you have to check out the Forum Nokia website. It has all the resourses you need to get you started from all the MIDP SDK's with the accompanying emulators, all the different platform SDK's including Series 40, Series 60, Series 80, development tools, all the tecnical specifications, extensive documentation on all available and upcoming technologies, developer forums where you can drop a question and most probably find what you are looking for has already been answered.
The site caters for game developers, enterprise developers, media developers and just about any other type of developer you can think of.

Lets get stuck into it - J2ME & Symbian

At the berlinfactor you will find some very useful code samples for bluetooth, http, modplayers, w32sockets and socket engines graphics utilities not to mention game utilities. There is also a game demo and a splash screen and much more useful crazy stuff.
All have source code included. They have just added a J2ME section, so check it out.