Reincarnation of “University”

sketch of the flipper-table
sketch of the flipper-table

Within the last 3 or 4 weeks I decided to further develop a small game application for the J2ME (Java Micro Edition), a.k.a. a mobile phone game. I begun this one with 2 fellow students at university for some kind of practical exercise of the lecture “Java in Embedded Systems” and after about 4 to 6 months we released a working but buggy alpha version. Which was ok for the course but a unreasonable demand for potentially end users. Finally 2 friends of mine, who served me as acceptance victims, surged me to implement at least a highscore. This was enough motivation – I reactivated the project and added some features, removed some bugs and made it to version 0.6. And for your convenience, I attached the game, please let me know your thoughts.

Basic Controls

  • Left Pad/Toggle Roll-over-targets – LEFT
  • Right Pads/Toggle Roll-over-targets – RIGHT
  • Release Ball – FIRE
  • Toggle debug graphics on/off – DOWN

Knows Bugs are:

  • Ball will leave screen on some points…
  • Ball “rolls” into obstacles
  • Pads strike through the ball, resulting in a downward hit
  • trying to hit the ball with the last end of a pad after it has rolled down the pad, may result in a false angle of incidence
  • some improper boundary coordinates (try to enter the upper left ramp…)
  • on some devices, the game crashes for unknown reason after been paused or while startup.

Oh.. don’t be surprised, although the game menu is in English the in-game-language is German, since the used vocabulary is only found on German universities.

Some words on licensing:
This one is very beta. For the moment I don’t consider making the game open source (since I have to talk about this with my fellows) nor making it freeware forever. But at this point I don’t care if you download it, play it, give it away to all your friends or whatever. If you want, reengineer it and increase those scores gained by some actions… on the other hand – if you’ve done that, contact me and maybe we’ll develop this game together ;). Future version may come with other terms of usage.

2 files included in archive:
Flipper.jad – Java Application Descriptor (you may not need this on some devices)
Flipper.jar – Actual game file

ZIP Archive