Plonk (formerly known as Mong) for Harmattan

Plonk (formerly known as Mong, but renamed since) is now available in Nokia Store for the N9 and N950 as free download:

• http://store.ovi.com/content/220976

This is a multi-touch game for two persons, so go out into the big blue room and ask somebody to have a game of Plonk with you :) As you probably already know, this game has been developed at the MeeGo Conference in collaboration with Cornelius Hald and Tim Samoff - sounds have been recorded directly at the hacker lounge by Erik Stein, and Randall Arnold came up with the new name. A real collaborative project, and the source is available from Gitorious! One challenge with Harmattan was disabling Swipe, we solved that with a nifty little class called SwipeControl - it's open source if you want to use it in your game, too :)

Multiplayer Tennix coming to your tablets soon

Last Tuesday, I have started working on adding network-based multiplayer support to Tennix (a free 2D tennis game for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and Maemo). In addition to two players playing on one computer (which already worked a long time ago), we now support playing Tennix over the network on two tablets (obviously, playing a tablet-versus-PC game will also work).

Currently, this network play runs over UDP, so WiFi connectivity is needed when you want to play tablet-versus-tablet. I might be able to add Bluetooth support later on, but the BlueZ API seems way more complicated than SDL_net's API which I currently use. Let me correct myself here: There's no real documentation for the BlueZ C API that I could find.

A small library with a clean API that abstracts Bluetooth, WiFi and maybe some other connectivity options and provides an easy way to establish a transport between two hosts/tablets would surely help boost developer interest in creating multi-player games and cross-tablet applications.

A video demoing the controls on two tablets can be found on YouTube.