Carol Hamer

Swingin’ Light Saber

When I was a youngling, I vowed to learn the ways of the BlackBerry and become a RIM-i master. I went in search of Yogurt the Wise!, Yogurt the All-Powerful!, Yogurt the Magnificent! Just plain blackberry Yogurt to his friends.

Adding a Professional Look and Feel

The most obvious element that separates a professional game from an amateur garage project isn’t the complexity of the game—it’s the use of graphics. The BB Maze example from Chapter 3 is already a complete game, but it suffers from one fatal flaw: it doesn’t look any better than the maze game people were playing on the Atari 2600 back in 1981. Nowadays, even on small devices, we can do a lot better than that.

Game Graphics and Events with MIDP and RIM Classes

The graphics and user interface (UI) classes are the place where you’ll have to choose between using the MIDP libraries and the RIM libraries. For most other types of functionality, RIM has made the choice for you by implementing either a standard JSR or a proprietary RIM library. In this chapter, you’ll learn how the philosophies of the two types of applications differ, and you’ll see how, when, and why to use either the RIM graphics/UI classes, the MIDP graphics/UI classes, or both.

Play a Live Opponent with SMS

Short Message Service (SMS) is a relatively primitive technology, originally designed in the late 1980s for devices with a lot less computing power than a BlackBerry smartphone. BlackBerry users can access their e-mail on their smartphones and typically have phone service contracts that include data transfer measured in megabytes. So it seems crazy to bother with tiny packets containing only 140 bytes of data! But there’s a reason why SMS is still a good choice for game communications: it has enormous and widespread support.

Security and Selling Your Game

Security is one of BlackBerry’s biggest selling points. Corporations can use BlackBerry Enterprise Solution to keep their confidential business data safe even when it’s on smartphones that employees are carrying out of the office. But even if you’re in the business of fun (instead of the business of business), the BlackBerry security model can help you when you’re selling your game.

Creating Role-Playing Games on the Internet

Internet-friendliness is one of BlackBerry’s biggest draws. Being able to access your e-mail (and the rest of the Internet) while you’re on the go is essentially the whole point of having a BlackBerry smartphone. So creating a social game (using the Internet) is a fun way to build on the BlackBerry platform’s strengths!

Remotely Drive a (Toy) Sports Car

Grab your Walther PPK, slip it nonchalantly into Q Branch’s specially modified Berns-Martin triple-draw holster. The name’s Bond, BlackBerry Bond.

Gaming on BlackBerry

Gaming on BlackBerry? Why games on BlackBerry? Aren’t BlackBerry smartphones built for business, not pleasure?

Fox and Hounds

As a formerly renowned Professor of Symbological Noetics, it was natural that I be asked to unravel the riddle, “7,000 Hollywood thanks to he who rests close to the leukodystrophies.”

Introducing 3D with JSR 239

Agent Psmith: Did you know that our first 3D application, the Beatrix, was designed to be a perfect world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. Jemima Puddle-Duck, Squirrel Nutkin, Benjamin Bunny. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. Then came Java ME, JSR 239, and Khronos.