Motally have announced that they will be releasing an analytics package for Android, iPhone and Blackberry which is geared towards the mobile gaming market.  Game Analytics, as it has been imaginatively named,will allow games developers to track the in-game behaviour of their customers as they play, allowing them to see, among other things, where gamers are spending the most time and  where they’re dropping out, allowing them to adjust their game accordingly.

Motally Game Analytics includes:

	Game Level – Find out what level your players are reaching. Use this info to optimize your game design.
	Scores/Leader Board – Find out who your top players are and know their high scores. Reach out to those on the leader board and present them with special offers or advertisements.
	Virtual Goods Purchases – Find out which virtual goods on your application are most popular. Use this information to create unique offers and drive additional sales.
	Cross Game Purchases – Find out which games are most popular in your portfolio
	Conversions to Premium – Find out who is converting from the free version to your premium game. Use this information to make decisions on your product and revenue strategy.

Motally’s Game Analytics is currently in closed private beta, but interested developers can still request to become part of the private beta from the Motally site.

One thing that springs immediately to my mind is, whilst a games developer being able to monitor user activity is undeniably a great thing, won’t the addition of Game Analytics impact upon game performance?  Surely it most to some extent?

{via Techcrunch}

Opera have announced that a beta version of the Opera Mini 5 browser has now been released to the Android Market.  Opera Mini 5 uses Opera’s compression tech, which redirects webpage requests through the company’s servers where they are compressed to reduce their size, before they are sent back to your mobile.  The idea being that pages load quicker, although there are compromises in that images are also compressed.

Some of the features of Opera Mini 5 include- tabbed browsing, a download manager and “Speed Dial”, which is essentially just a bookmarking method.  Opera claim that the browser loads pages faster due to page sizes being compressed by up to 90% by their servers before it reaches your phone.

Opera’s timing is certainly good with an Android version of Fennec still a long way off.  We’d still rather have Opera Mobile rather than Mini, but more browser choice certainly isn’t a bad thing.  It’ll be interesting to see how this browser performs.

The full list of features is available at the Opera site.

The app was put together as a proof of concept botnet as part of a presentation at last week’s RSA Conference.  Brown and Tijerina claim that it would be a simple matter to have the application steal even more details, including passwords and even stored files from the phone.  Over 90 per cent of WeatherFist downloads were to Android phones, which has yet again prompted the security of apps on the Android Market to be brought in to question: “The average user is not tech-savvy enough to police the apps they put on their phone,” says Brown.

{via The Register and New Scientist}

Given that there were grumblings towards the end of last year from some games developers (eg Gameloft) that they were moving away from developing for Android due to poor sales, it’s nice to hear of an Android gaming success story.  Mobile games developers Polarbit today released a statement that their Android games have surpassed 1 million downloads from the Android Market.  Polarbit are the team behind some very popular 3D games such as Raging Thunder and Armageddon Squadron.

Polarbit surpass one million Android downloads

Stockholm, Sweden – Polarbit, noted cross-platform mobile game developers, announced today that their applications have exceeded one million total downloads on Googles Android Market.

The announcement follows hot on the heals of Polarbits millionth Ovi Store download in early February. Polarbit are now one of an exclusive few, possibly the only, developers to have seen more than one million downloads on each of the big three mobile platforms – Symbian, Android and iPhone. This goes to show Polarbits strength as multiplatform developers, and their dedication to support as wide a range of platforms as possible.

Not satisfied by resting on their laurels however, Polarbit will continue to expand platform support in their middleware platform Fuse to ensure they reach as many gamers as possible, and are looking forward to breaking the million download mark on many further platforms in the future.

So, for those companies who complained that their Android sales are poor; clearly the market is lucrative for some people, perhaps it comes down to the product?

The latest release of the Android Native Development Kit is now available for download, as announced on Google Android Developers blog yesterday.  The most interesting addition is Open GL ES 2.0 support.  Open GL ES 2.0 will offer Android phones (only those running Android 2.0 or later unfortunately) much improved 3D graphics – an area in which Android has previously been found wanting when compared to the likes of the iPhone 3GS.

Here’s the relevant information from the announcement-

“It can be used to target devices running Android 1.5 and higher. In addition to a few bug fixes and improvements, this release includes the following new features:

Toolchain improvement

The toolchain binaries have been refreshed for this release with GCC 4.4.0, which should generate slightly more compact and efficient machine code than the previous one (4.2.1).

Note that the GCC 4.4.0 C++ frontend is more pedantic, and may refuse to compile certain rare and invalid template declarations that were accepted by 4.2.1. To alleviate the problem, this NDK still provides the 4.2.1 binaries, which can optionally be used to build your machine code.

OpenGL ES 2.0 support

Applications targeting Android 2.0 (API level 5) or higher can now directly access OpenGL ES 2.0 features. This brings the ability to control graphics rendering through vertex and fragment shader programs, using the GLSL shading language.

A new trivial sample, named “hello-gl2″, demonstrates how to render a simple triangle using both shader types.

Name simplification

This NDK release is just called “r3″, for “Revision 3″, to indicate that it is not limited to a specific Android platform/API level. Some developers thought that the previous release’s name (1.6_r1) was confusing and indicated that it could only be used to target Android 1.6, which was not true.”

The new NDK is available for download here.

Following on from Gamevil’s recent announcement that an Android version of Zenonia will be released later this month, we thought we’d take the opportunity to find out a little bit more about the company and their plans for their Android titles.  Gamevil have a few Android games on the market already, including the very popular Baseball Superstars.  Kyu Lee, President of Gamevil USA, kindly agreed to answer a few of our questions.

Firstly, can you tell us a little bit about Gamevil and it’s background in mobile games development?

“GAMEVIL is a public mobile game developer and publisher. It was established in the year 2000, and ever since we have been developing for handhelds. We currently have offices in Seoul and Los Angeles with around 110 employees in total.”

You recently announced the release of an Android version of Zenonia.  Do you have any plans for further ports of your games to Android?

“Yes, we are planning to continuously develop and port new games for the Android platform.”

You have a few titles in the Android market already, such as Path of a Warrior and Baseball Superstars, which has proven the most popular?

“Baseball Superstars has been the best performing title on the Android platform so far.”

What is Gamevil’s prefered development environment?  Do you code for one particular format (eg iPhone or Windows Mobile) and then port a title to the others or do you use a separate, generic development environment and port from there?

“We originally develop our games in native C/C++ language to support WIPI-C, and we then port to other platforms including Android.”

Can you tell us a little bit about the general development cycle for your titles?  How do you approach creating a new title and how is your team structured?

“We currently have about 110 employees and among them 80 our involved in game development. And we produce about 10 titles annually every year. So on average, you can assume it is a 8 person team working on a single title for a year.”

Which, if any, Android devices do your team use (either for testing or for their own personal use)?

“Our team primarily tests on the G1, Hero, DROID and the Nexus One.  Nexus One is the more popular device among members of our team. For our team in Korea, the new MOTOROI is the device that they have been supporting.”

Fragmentation of hardware and OS versions has been the biggest criticism of the Android OS so far.  Has fragmentation caused any issues during the development of your Android titles?

“We now support two different screensizes as default. And fragmentation also does involve more testing, and we expect the amount of testing to increase in the future if this continues to happen.”

Piracy is an issue which affects all professional games’ developers to some extent, how badly would you say Gamevil have been affected by piracy?  Do you use any copy protection methods for your mobile titles?

“We’ve been using the default copy protection methods that Google provides, but however, we haven’t been adding any internal solution to our Android titles yet. We respect our users, and believe they will not pirate our titles to create an healthy ecosystem to continuously develop better titles for the platform.”

A number of games publishers have already expressed dismay at poor sales of Android titles, have you found that sales of your Android games have been disappointing compared to your predictions?  And, going forward, how much potential do Gamevil see in Android as a platform?

“Baseball Superstars has been one of the better selling titles on the Android platform. It may be small but it is enough to justify our development cost and we believe it is an investment into the future for the Android community.”

Can you give us an insight in to any future titles we can expect to see Gamevil releasing to the Android Market?

“We’re currently considering bringing Baseball Superstars 2010 to the Android platform, and also planning on bringing more based on the amount of success we see here.”

Thanks again to Kyu Lee and Gamevil USA Inc for granting us the interview. Baseball Superstars and Path of a Warrior are available for purchase on the Android Market now and Zenonia should be available at some point later this month.

Gamevil have announced that this month they will be releasing an Android version of their very popular role-playing action game, Zenonia.  Zenonia has sold more than a million copies worldwide across the iPhone, Windows Mobile and BREW platforms.

“We”re extremely happy to bring one of our fastest growing franchises, ZENONIA, to one of the most fastest growing mobile platforms in the world.”, stated Jin Woo, Marketing Director at GAMEVIL. “Through our success of Baseball Superstars on the Android Market, we”ve decided to bring more of our games to Android to satisfy our fans and further extend our multi-platform strategy. ”

Zenonia is a manga style, top-down RPG, leaning toward the action side of the genre, rather than heavy role-play.  The official feature list is as follows-

Play as the young warrior, Regret, as you set off to discover your path and solve the mystery of your father’s death.
Follow the path of good or evil as you make decisions that will alter destiny and uncover the secret of ZENONIA!

The spirit of Real Classic Action RPG

Features

• Anime style characters and graphics
• Numerous quests following an epic storyline
• Various skills with stylish effects
• Hundreds of unique items for each character
• Innovative elements that reflect real life
• Long play time (packed with over 40 hours of game-play)

Details

• Skill Tree System
• (8 Active + 8 Passive skills and 1 ultimate skill for each character)
• 5 item classes (Normal, Magic, Rare, Unique, and Epic)
• Good-and-Evil decision tree with a different storylinedepending on the path you choose
• Day/Night cycle, Hunger & Weight System that reflects reality
• Dynamic movements by double-tap dashing with optimized on screen D-Pad
• Automatic target facing and intuitive controls

We’ll have a full review once the game is released.

Mashable are reporting that Google are set to launch an app store targeting business users at some point over the course of the next week, possibly as early as tomorrow.  To my mind, this is a good move for Google.  They need a strong catalogue of enterprise apps if they have any plans to make in-roads in tempting the corporate market.

The existing apps market receives a lot of criticism due to it being occasionally difficult to navigate.  It’s also full of all sorts of nonsense apps such as soundboards and pornographic offerings.  A cleaner, corporate version of the Apps Market, with the chaff filtered out, can only be a good thing.  It’ll also benefit the developers as their apps are less likely to be lost amongst the pages and pages of fart apps and poker games.  There is one potential drawback from a consumer point of view however: for developers, having your app surrounded by other professional offerings at a similar price, rather than untold numbers of home-brewed free apps, may just tempt some companies to increase the purchase price of their apps.

Canabalt

Simple, yet hugely addictive survival game.  You must run and jump across rooftops, dodging death for as long as you possibly can.  The monochrome graphics look good and the audio is superb.  This is available both as an iPhone app and as a Flash game, so even if it’s never actually ported to Android, those of us who are lucky enough tp receive mobile Flash support will at least be able to play the online version.

Engadget app

There’s not a day that goes by that we here at This Android Life don’t read at least one Engadget article.  The folks over at the good ship Engadget recently released an iPhone app that delivers their news feeds direct to the device.  It also allows you access to the image galleries, video feeds and podcasts without leaving the app.  Twitter, Facebook and email integration is also included should you wish to share an article with others.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

This superb addition to the Grand Theft Auto series was originally released for the Nintendo DS and PSP, but it was recently ported to iPhone, so there’s no reason why it won’t work on higher end Android devices.  Widely regarded as one of the best games available for handheld devices, we’d love to see it making an appearance in the Android Market.

In Chinatown Wars you play Huang Lee, the son of a recently murdered Triad boss who has recently arrived in Liberty City to meet with family.  You end up involved in all sorts of illegal activities, ultimately leading to an opportunity to avenge your father’s death.

Bloom

Bloom is a collaboration between the father of ambient music, Brian Eno, and software designer cum musician, Peter Chilvers.  Described by Eno as “an endless music machine, a music box for the 21st century”, Bloom is part artwork part musical instrument.  You tap a section of the mellow pastel-coloured screen and a note plays, with bassier notes found at the bottom of the screen and the treble at the top.  When you’ve finished tapping, the notes you’ve selected are played back to you in a loop.  If you don’t tap the screen at all, Bloom can generate it’s own tune randomly and play it back to you.  The results are surprisingly musical and anyone who has played around with Bloom for 10 minutes or so will tell you it’s a hugely relaxing app.

Fantastic Contraption

Fantastic Contraption is a Flash physics puzzle game where the objective is to move a number of red objects from their starting position to an end zone.  You place a number of building objects such as free-spinning or powered wheels and spokes in a designated building area.  With these simple objects you can build surprisingly complex and powerful machines to drive, push, roll or even slingshot the red objects to their goal.  If you’re new to Fantastic Contraption, play it a few times, then do a search for some of the video walkthroughs:  some of the Fantastic Contraption community created solutions are simply brilliant.

Fennec

Yes, we know Android will be getting the mobile version of Firefox eventually, but it’s not finished yet, so it’s still high up on our wishlist.  Android is screaming out for a really good browser.  The stock browser is ok; it does it’s job with a minimum of fuss but it is a little limited.  Dolphin was a good, solid alternative when it was first released, but then it’s developers decided to jam it up with adware, which understandably put a lot of users off.

World of Goo

World of Goo is a puzzle game created by indie developers 2DBoy which became a massive commercial and critical success after it’s release.  It’s similar in theme to Lemmings, in that your ultimate goal is to get a set number of goo balls to an exit pipe.  To do this, you build towers, bridges and other structures out of some of the goo balls.  There are several different types of goo ball, each with their own attributes and properties.

It’s a very enjoyable game which looks great.  2DBoy announced that an iPhone version is under development now, so hopefully they won’t ignore Android and we’ll see a version for it too.

Flash

Again, we know this is coming (for some Android users anyway), but Flash opens up so many other app possibilities, that it just can’t come quick enough.  With Flash support, Android devices will not be limited to apps coded specifically for Android, rather they will be able to connect to Flash served apps and games hosted on the internet.  Maybe Steve Jobs’ prediction that Flash has no place in the html5 driven future of the internet, but right now, it’s a powerful and liberating tool.

A couple of enterprising web engineers called Tim Heath and Ryan Hickman are using an Android phone as a ‘brain’ for a fully mobile robot they have created.  At the moment, it’s nothing more than a cardboard wagon with a phone on top and it doesn’t do very much more than roll around, but it’s creators see a lot of potential in the little fella that they call – “Truckbot”.

Truckbot uses a G1 phone for it’s brain, tying in with the phones on board compass, and later versions will utilize other phone functions such as GPS: presumably so he knows where the nearest power outlet is when his battery juice is running low.  The whole thing only cost the pair a lowly $30.  It’ll be interesting to see just how far they can take this idea.  I can’t help imagining a future where you can send your phone to the fridge to get you an ice cold beer…

You can read more here.

{via Wired.com}