Two Devilishgames titles will be available when the new BlackBerry Playbook launches!

RIM's first adventure outside their comfy zone, the upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook, looks to be a promising contender on the tablet market. With its 7" screen, dual core 1 Ghz processor and a gig of memory it can definitely hold it's own, but the support for various standard web technologies, especially Flash for me, could make this gadget a real winner as a gaming platform.

Devilishgames will be there when the PlayBook officially launches next week with two of our games in the App World at $0.99 each: "Chute Academy" and "Run Run Hamster"

After seeing the PlayBook promotion on flashgamelicense.com we couldn't resist having a go at adapting a couple of our games to this new platform. As promised in the documentation, the conversion turned out to be as easy as changing the resolution of the game to fit the PlayBook and make the game react accordingly to some tablet related user actions through an API. An hour or so later, the first game was ready to be tested in the simulation environment...

...And this is where things started to go, let's say, less smoothly. Setting up the VMWare test machine, registering, packaging, signing, navigating the App World site, it was all pretty awful and at the time I was tearing my hairs out by the bunch. Cooled down and looking back at it now, probably it was just a big hassle more than actually really difficult. A lot of steps, a lot of unclear choices, never knowing if I made the right decisions before moving on to the next step - that kind of headaches. But it turned out just fine.

So now we've got "Chute Academy" and "Run Run Hamster" up for sale on the App World! Hurray!

As the US release date is set for April 19th, there's a funny problem for us devs having games up on the PlayBook App World... obviously we haven't actually been able to play the games for ourselves! And although the BlackBerry team has tested and approved them and the guys at FlashGameLicense have been so kind to have a go at it on their pre-release version, I am still looking forward very much to actually holding this tablet in my own hands so I can check for myself if all the little details are working as they should.

If all goes well, more Devilishgames will be coming soon for the PlayBook!

bas