CATEGORY: Android

Last week, at their sixth annual developers' meeting, Google announced the creation of its answer to Apple’s Game Centre and Microsoft’s Xbox Live. It was no big surprise as it was leaked by Android Police before the event. It’s called Google Play Game Services and it’s already been included in some game updates out there. What opportunities is this going to provide for developers and how will it affect the social gaming community as a whole?

The new game from the Monkeybin team is a move away from dexterity and hand to eye co-ordination and towards getting your brain into gear!

With the recent release of MindFeud – Monkeybin’s social board game for mobile iOS and Android devices – we thought we’d take a look at the whole genre of social gaming to see what’s happening.

You can’t really have a great mobile game without great mobile graphics, though the old fans of Tetris may disagree! As mobile gaming continues to boom, the demand for more sophisticated graphics for mobile devices also advances; it presents many challenges because of the obvious size, memory, processor power and battery restrictions of the mobile devices like smart phones and tablets; we take a look at that below.

OK, it’s been a tough week and we’ve had enough of the serious talk, so we thought we’d have a bit of fun and take a look at the craziest smartphone apps around. We introduce the 10 maddest apps for iPhones and Androids to you below – in no particular order.

Such is the glamorous life of app and game developers that we used to have to spend ages playing around with Photoshop, resizing and reformatting images to create the right icons to include in iPads, iPhones and Android-based apps and games. It‘s at times like that you sometimes wonder about getting a real job :-) No more! The Iconimator application does it all for you in a flash.

There is a growing storm amongst developers about device fragmentation with the Android handset, so we threw a monkey’s tea party here at Monkeybin and posed the question - is it really just a storm in a teacup?

There has been a lot of heated talk in developer circles in the past 12 months or so about coders having to support "thousands of different android phone hardware and screen sizes"; it is often compared to working with the iOS platform, which is generally seen as child’s play in terms of coding compatibility.

We love games that are full of action and frantic gameplay. This is another one of those. We have planned to include both multiplayer and singleplayer modes. That calls for coding some AI, and we are so looking forward to see how smart we can get those machine controlled players.