Shape Tap Supreme is my second game that I made for Android. It’s powered by libGDX. The goal of this game is to tap a randomly picked shape on the screen shown on every sound start, before the shape touches the spikes on the bottom.

Inspiration

The inspiration for Shape Tap came from wanting to create a game which has simple game mechanics, and a short round time to allow for ‘quick playability’. The idea is that the player will be able to play many rounds in a short amount of time, which is convenient to whip out to kill time when waiting for things.

Gameplay

Pictured are all 5 shapes that can appear during gameplay. Each shape is obviously distinct in it’s shape, but each also have a different color. This is to help the user recognize which image is which during gameplay.

On each round start, the user is presented which shape they are to be tapping. Tapping anywhere starts a round, and in this case the user must tap all falling green pentagons before they reach the bottom spikes.

During a round, the score (the number of shapes tapped) is clearly displayed at the top. Once a shape slips passed the user and hits the bottom spikes, the round ends.

Integrations

This game was a bit more complex than my first one in terms of integrations. One thing I wanted to integrate into gameplay was [box2D])https://github.com/erincatto/Box2D), which is a physics engine meant for games. libGDX provides a wrapper library in Java, which makes interfacing with it easier. The biggest challenge in integrating box2D was syncing up the sprite rendering along with the body collision detection.

Another integration that was a challenge was Google Play Game Services (GPS). The biggest hurdle with this was having to implement the GPS API calls in the ‘native’ android service, which meant having to implement a message handler between the game application logic and the android application logic.

Download

This game is available for free to download on Google Play.