Hamster: Attack! is now published by Backflip Studios on Android, the developer of the top games Paper Toss, Ninjump, and many others on iOS.

And with the new release, there are no more coins required to play any of the first 90 levels, including six that are completely new!

Our first original title is now available! Take on the role of Hammy, a cute Hamster who's escaped from captivity and begun the big job of freeing his friends!

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It's time to start showing off Hamster: Attack! I've made a couple of really short game play videos; you can see them after the break. They're early levels (simple, no sounds yet), so they'll get a lot more punch by the time we're finished with them.

Development has been moving along quickly; most of the features we plan to include in the first release are now in the game. We have a couple of more characters to add for our heroic hamster to rescue, and some other minor things like making all the buttons work (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), but we're getting really close.

The art for Hamster: Attack! is nearly complete. We'd like to share with you some characters and places that will be very important to our hairy little hero.

One of the ways I've learned to improve performance of a game is to reduce use of video memory through the use of texture atlases. A "texture" in a game, in this context, is a bit of graphics that will be drawn to the screen as part of the game.

A texture atlas is a set of textures that have been cropped to the size of the actual image I need in the game -- when image files come from the artist, they usually contain a great deal of blank space around the image, and those blank pixels take up valuable video RAM, which can slow down the frame rate during game play.

When I started to work on my first indie game under the Recharge Games banner, I wanted to start with an existing library. I’d just spent almost six years working on the Playground SDK for PlayFirst, and was sick to death of writing game engines.

After doing a survey of what was available for Android in May of 2010, though, I came to the conclusion that none of the contenders would do everything that I wanted. And so I started working on my own engine. It couldn’t take that long, right?

We're approaching the final stretch on our first original game -- close enough that I want to finally announce its official name:

Hamster: Attack!

We had a great response to it at GDC. Angel and I showed a pre-alpha version of the game with animations, demo levels and game art.

I'm happy to announce that Angel Inokon has joined the team working on our first original title!

Angel has a distinguished history producing hit titles like Dream Chronicles 2: The Eternal Maze, Dream Chronicles: The Chosen Child, and others for PlayFirst, where she worked with Tim. At Recharge Games she will be taking on the role of Senior Producer and Lead Designer for our first independent title, and we're all excited about the energy, experience, and design expertise she's bringing to the project.

Expect messages from Angel on this site in the near future, including information about our upcoming game!

Over the past few months I've been working with Backflip to port their hot iPhone game, NinJump, over to Android. And now it's done! Download it now! It's free!

You can get it on Android using the following QR code...

After a long search for an artist or art team for our first game, we finally settled on a team based on a recommendation from an old friend. They produced some amazing concept art that really sold me. See below for the first public showing of some of the concept art for our upcoming game.