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Sailfish OS update from Jolla
Update on Jolla’s situation and Community activities
As you’ll have likely read elsewhere in the forum, Jolla has had a tough time recently with the need to change its ownership structure to remove Russian involvement.
Jolla’s CEO will return to this topic in a blog post in the coming days, so keep an eye on Jolla’s blog for updates.
In this challenging situation, we’ve also decided we need to focus our resources, particularly to tackle some of the engineering challenges which have for example been holding up the next Sailfish OS release.
As a result, we’re planning to reduce the number of community-related activities we’re actively involved in. This will mean a pause to our long-running community meetings, and a cut-back version of the fortnightly newsletter. We’re also likely to be less active on the forum than we have been up to now.
Our usual release plan is for three or four releases per year. Given the delay to the 4.4.0 release (of which more below), alongside this challenging situation, it’s likely that we will also see fewer Sailfish OS releases this year as well.
This refocusing will only be temporary, but we want to emphasize that this isn’t an indication of any less commitment to you, our community, or Sailfish X. We feel that we’ll be better off serving you all by focusing our effort on getting through this tricky time and maximizing our engineering and development activity.
However, we will be back to normal as soon as possible, and we hope you will continue to support us as we work through this. In addition to the Sailfish OS 4.4.0 Vanha Rauma release, we have some nice announcements lined up as well, so do stay tuned.
Sailfish OS 4.4.0 Vanha Rauma Early Access
The big news this fortnight is, of course, the release to Early Access of Sailfish OS 4.4.0 Vanha Rauma. Counter-intuitively we don’t want to focus on it in this newsletter, since as I write this the majority of users (who aren’t signed up for Early Access), won’t yet have received their update notification.
We’ll certainly be looking at it in more detail once it’s gone out to general release, but in the meantime, Leszek Lesner is once again ahead of the curve with his TechView podcast, giving a thorough hands-on summary of what’s new in the Early Access release.
While we build up to the full Sailfish OS 4.4.0 release, we thought we’d take the opportunity to relax a little. And since our preferred way to relax is to immerse ourselves in a nice warm bath of video-game distraction, we thought we’d round up some of the games that us here at Jolla play on our Sailfish OS phones.
Energy from the Community
Gaming has come a long way since the release of the Jolla 1 in 2013. The move to ubiquitous online connections has seen LAN-based game parties transformed into e-sports with their multi-million dollar prize funds, while games in general are starting to rival big-budget films in terms of development and marketing costs.
The XBox, Nintendo and Sony console juggernauts continue to dominate the home gaming market, but meanwhile mobile gaming has become its own massive business. Even if they can’t rival VR in terms of total immersion, there’s still space for bite-sized portable games that you can fit in while travelling on the bus, waiting for an appointment, or generally just filling in the gaps in your day.
On Sailfish OS the latest Android games generally run well with AppSupport. But if you want to avoid microtransactions, loot boxes, pervasive ads and the like then there are also plenty of native games that avoid these darker design patterns.
With all this in mind, we asked the Jolla team what they’re playing on their Sailfish OS devices. Here’s what they said.
Picross 2
Picross 2 was recommended by Tomi Leppänen (tomin) one of Jolla’s Software Engineers and also an app developer himself. We looked at Picross 2 way back in May last year where it received an unequivocal seal of approval. Here’s Tomi with the details.
This is a Japanese “crossword” app. There is a grid and then numbers around, and the player’s goal is to fill the right squares in the grid to form the picture described by the numbers.
I think it’s well-implemented and fairly well optimised for mobile use. Again one of those puzzle games that one can play when there is a bit of time to spend but nothing better to do. It can sometimes take a bit of thinking to come up with a solution.
Created by Matti Viljanen (direc85), the game is quite addictive, and I must admit that after having tested it out for the newsletter last May, I was thoroughly hooked until completing all of the inbuilt designs. The larger patterns get genuinely challenging, but never lose their calming appeal. Picross 2 is available in the Jolla Store and on OpenRepos.
Lines
We took a look at lines a couple of newsletters back when Slava Monich (slava) released an update for it. If you’re a regular reader, it won’t surprise you therefore to hear that this is a nice puzzle-based native game, which asks you to arrange lines of coloured spheres embedded in a grid. As the sphere-master, you get to control which spheres move where. They can be directed to walk anywhere on the grid, so long as their movement isn’t impeded by other spheres blocking their path.
Suggested by Ville Nummela (vige), Technical Product Manager for Jolla’s Developer Offering, he describes it as a “simple puzzle game, where you try to connect five or more balls of similar colors in vertical, horizontal or diagonal lines.”
But the simplicity in this case is deceptive, especially as the grid gradually fills up with spheres, blocking the movement required to complete the line you’ve been working on for the past however-many steps. Ville praises the deceptive depth, along with Slava’s nice implementation.
Even though it looks simple, it requires quite a lot of thinking. The individual games are relatively short, at least if you are bad at the game (like me), so you can play the game if you have a few minutes to waste. It’s also nice that it saves the situation, so you can continue it later if you suddenly run out of time.
As with the other item’s in Slava’s app catalogue, Lines is available from many places: the Jolla Store, OpenRepos and Chum.
Tomb Raider
This next game was suggested by Andrew Branson (abranson), another of Jolla’s Software Engineers. But it also happens to have been ported by another of Jolla’s Software Engineers: Matti Lehtimäki (mal). Andrew describes the game as:
a port of an open source reimplementation of the original Tomb Raider game from the 90s.
To fill that out a bit, this is a version of the original Tomb Raider game that was developed by Core Design and published by Eidos Interactive for the Playstation and PC three decades ago. The original spawned the renowned adventuring career of Lara Croft, including 16 other console games, several mobile games, three films and a graphic adventure series. The open source reimplementation by XProger is called OpenLara, the Web-version of which will even run nicely on the Sailfish browser.
Matti has ported it to run natively on Sailfish OS, which brings a number of benefits, including support for controllers, so you can play it as it was originally intended. Andrew reports success with both a Nintendo 64 and an XBox controller attached to his Sailfish phone via a USB-OTG adaptor, while Adam Pigg (**piggz) has successfully used the Moga Pro Bluetooth controller.
You’ll need to find yourself some of the original game files to play the game. Eidos released the first level as a free demo back in the day; the games files for this are widely available and work nicely. However, if you own the original PC CD ROMs you can also play the full game with the original music using the game files from those. But is the game worth playing? Here’s what Andrew gets out of the game:
Great nostalgia, amazing to see on a mobile device, if a bit rough round the edges and incomplete. Still waiting for Sailfish OS Manic Miner.
As I write this, TombRaider isn’t yet publicly available. But it’s already running nicely, so expect a release from Matti in the near future. Matti tells me that dependencies prevent it from being released to the Jolla Store, so keep your eyes on OpenRepos and Chum for the release.
Machines vs Machines
Another game suggested by Ville, Machines vs Machines by Mark Washeim (poetaster) is another game we featured a couple of newsletters ago. As Ville explains, this is a tower-defence style game:
You build towers, trying to kill the robots before they reach their destination. I remember playing the game years ago on the Jolla Tablet. Now that the game arrived on aarch64, I just couldn’t resist playing it again. The adrenaline rush when you are trying to quickly place the correct towers in the correct positions and decide whether to build a new tower or improve the old ones, while the enemy just keeps marching on.
There are so many nice things in the game that make it more enjoyable: The levels keep on getting more difficult at just the right pace, so that always when you think you know how the game is supposed to be played, the next level will show you how wrong you are. It’s nice that you can return to the earlier levels after unlocking new towers, or just new skills, and see if you can improve your score. I like the graphics, I like the music, I like almost everything about the game. The only thing I don’t like is that it doesn’t have enough levels, so after you have finished all levels with the hardest difficulty, then that’s it, time to find some other game to play, or wait a few years until you have forgotten how to beat each level.
So, a pretty strong endorsement there, and definitely one to try. If you’d like to give Machines vs Machines a go, it’s available in the Jolla Store, on OpenRepos and from Chum.
Colourdots
Colourdots is Andrew Branson’s second suggestion, and a game created by Marko Wallin (walokra). It sees you connecting dots together, not in straight lines, but instead in rectilinear paths, much like the Android pattern lock. Here’s Andrew’s description of the game:
Join as many same-coloured dots together so they disappear and new ones fall from the top. Get a high score in a limited number of moves.
When asked what he particularly likes about the game, Andrew explains that it’s “casual fun, and kids like it too.”
The touchscreen provides a nice canvas for swiping across the dots to create the patterns, giving the game a very tactile feel. I was a little surprised when first playing the game that only horizontal and vertical lines are catered for, and it seems Andrew had much the same reaction.
I have my own fork of this which allows diagonal lines, adds extra moves for each dot enclosed when the line forms a closed loop around it, and fixes the spelling of ‘colour’ in the original. I did submit a PR years ago, but I don’t think the original author liked my changes much so I kept them to myself
Although the change of spelling may be a niche requirement, I’m sure Andrew’s other changes would be widely welcomed, so I’ve lobbied him to make them available. In the meantime, the original is available from the Jolla Store, OpenRepos and Chum.
Patience Deck
We first looked at Patience Deck back in June of last year. Having grown up playing patience-style games on a range of devices running a variety of different operating systems (including an archaic platform known as “a pack of cards”), this was always going to be an appealing game. Created by Jolla Software Engineer Tomi Leppänen (tomin), we asked Tomi to give us his own take on his creation.
It’s a collection of patience games. There is a good number of different patience games to play and it includes some of the better known card games but also some rarely seen gems. The cards have been also optimised for mobile use and there is also a vibration feedback option.
And what’s so special about this particular implementation compared to ones we might have played in the past? Tomi explains.
I feel that every platform should have a good implementation of a patience/solitaire game collection. That means the UI should not get in the way of enjoying the games and there should be enough variation among the games. I felt there was no better way to do this but recreate GNOME Aisleriot for Sailfish OS. There are even bigger collections out there (just check PySol Fan Club Edition) but I felt that Aisleriot which I’ve played on the Linux desktop would be perfect for Sailfish too.
It’s pretty much a full reimplementation sans the games: the engine has the most similarity because it was built guided by Aisleriot to be compatible with the games implemented in the Scheme language. My goal has been to make the best patience game collection for Sailfish and while there is still work to do (from 0.7.1 to 1.0 there are some steps to take) I think it has a pretty good UI already.
I’m inclined to agree with Tomi’s assessment, and so it seems are others, with it charging in to the top ten list of apps on the Jolla Store in 2021. The game is easy to play on small-screen devices, and is a very nice native implementation. But Tomi isn’t content to rest on his laurels:
The next version that shall be released in a month will still bring very good improvements to playability and usability and I won’t stop there!
Patience Deck is available from the Jolla Store and OpenRepos.
Simon Tatham’s Puzzles
Perusing through this list you’ll notice that the majority of native Sailfish OS games are puzzle-oriented. In contrast, Simon Tatham’s Puzzles is something completely different: an Android app that’s puzzle oriented. This one suggested by Santtu Lakkala (inz), Software Engineer at Jolla, it’s not just one puzzle but in fact a bulging set of forty puzzles in total. As Santtu explains, it’s a:
collection of logic puzzles (including, but not limited to, Sudoku, Minesweeper, etc.).
Santtu particularly likes the fact that the focus is all on the games, and nothing else:
Great brain twisters, no ads, no waiting, no bells or whistles.
All forty of the the original puzzles are also available on the Web in Javascript form, so if you’re not running AppSupport on your phone for the Android version you can still enjoy them through the browser, albeit in not quite such a convenient form.
Amongst the games you’ll find a nice mixture of familiar, unusual, relatively straightforward and quite tough options to choose from. If you’re running from the app there’s a night mode which switches the background from light to dark. Many of the games also have their own customisable options, such as the size of the board, and you can also save and reload your progress at any point.
If you want the One Puzzle Game to Rule them All, then you can get Simon Tatham’s Puzzles using AppSupport from your Android Store of choice, for example using the Aurora Store client.
2048 and KibiTiles
I’m not sure from where the 2048 game concept originates, but it seems to be a bit of a required gaming experience on Sailfish OS. It’s so popular that there are at least five different native versions available, and many more if you include Android variants.
The mechanics of the game are pretty simple, but surprisingly hard to describe. Thankfully Tomi has done a great job of explaining.
This is a very simple puzzle game where you have a 4-by-4 grid that starts with two tiles, both of which have value of 2. Using gestures you move the tiles towards one of the edges and when tiles have the same value they are combined and the combined tile’s value is their sum. At that point you also get a randomly placed new tile that has value of 2 or 4. The goal is to get a value as high as possible by repeating this. As is typical for many Sailfish games, this app doesn’t have an original idea, i.e. it has been implemented before, but it extends on it providing also bigger grids than 4-by-4 which is the default.
Interestingly, it’s once again the simplicity of the game that provides much of the appeal for Tomi, just as it did for Ville with Lines:
It has simple mechanics which makes it work well on a mobile device and a great game to enjoy in brief moments when you are waiting for something but don’t want to bother your brain too much. It’s also difficult enough to make it challenging and enjoyable.
For a clean and no-frills implementation, 2048 by Fabien Proriol (condo4) and Matti Viljanen (direc85) is available from the Jolla Store. KibiTiles by BlueMagma is also available from the Jolla Store and provides a more varied set of options. For example you can change the difficulty (which changes the variety of tiles that are randomly generated), alter the size of the board, and even switch to a hexagonal rather than rectilinear grid. It adds some impressive variety.
Another 2048 variant by Giuseppe Corti (GsCRuL3Z) is available on OpenRepos for providing the basic game. Finally 2048gc by shar provides a neat twist by allowing control by tilting your phone available, which is available from OpenRepos. This last is a clever idea, but in practice I found swiping to provide a more calming experience.
Dino
I hesitated before including Dino in the list, since it’s arguably more of a doodle than a game. But there’s a jumping dinosaur and a high score to beat, so it definitely fulfils some of the most important requirements.
Dino falls squarely into the genre of infinite runners, and also happens to be one of the cuter Easter Eggs from the Chrome browser. It’s usual home is as the browser’s connection failure message. Rustem Abzalov (arustg) provides us with this implementation for Sailfish OS, which makes use of the WebView component to provide the same experience as the original.
The graphics are retro monochrome and you don’t need a gameplad to play: simply tap the screen to make the titular dinosaur jump over the obstacles as it dashes towards them at breakneck speed. You’re primarily concerned about the cactus outcrops, nasty spiky things that they are. But run for long enough and you’ll find other obstacles appearing too.
It may be small, but it’s perfectly formed with a full day-night cycle baked into the story. Every 100 points the difficulty jumps up a level, increasing the speed of your dinosaur and decreasing the distance between obstacles. If the pace gets too much, well, there’s a hack for that.
The game world is randomly generated, which helps with variety and increases replayability. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced Dino is more than just a doodle. It’s pretty much the pinacle of mobile gaming sophistication.
The Sailfish OS implementation of Dino is available from the Jolla Store and OpenRepos.
Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey
In case Dino doesn’t contain enough infinite running to satisfy your infinite running needs, then the two Alto games from Team Alto might be what you’re looking for, with their infinite snowboarding games.
They take the same simple single-tap-to-jump control mechanic of Dino and embellish it with gorgeous 2D cut-out graphics, atmospheric sounds and a gorgeous ambient soundtrack that rises and falls with the flow of the game.
Alto’s Adventure is the first of the two games and sees our hero Alto hurtling down the snow-draped mountainside on a snowboard while herding his escaped lama’s back to safety. The lamas are surprisingly nimble on the snowy slopes. There are a plenty of hazards — rocks, chasms, elders, tornadoes, ice slicks and more — to negotiate using the jump mechanic. On top of that you can also gain extra points by performing tricks such as backflips, rope slides, balloon bounces and so on.
On each run you’re also given three challenges to perform, success with which progresses you through the levels, allowing you to unlock characters with new skills to make the game faster and keep things interesting. You can also increase your skills by buying power-ups using the Sonic-style coins collected during your downhill descent.
The second game, Alto’s Odyssey, takes you from the snowy slopes to the sandy hills. The games are quite similar, but the fresh graphics and a new soundtrack breathe new life into the game. There are some more concrete changes too, such as the removal of ice and addition of wall riding in the canyons.
Both games are available as free ad-supported Android apps via, for example, the Aurora Store client. Both run impeccably on Sailfish OS.
Aenigma
Aenigma by KronSamuel (black_sheep_dev) is a game we featured back in January of this year. It is, in short, a Sudoku game. When we tested it out, we found it to be incredibly feature-packed, including options to add notes to the board, get hints and provide extra information through the user interface to make the game more appealing.
Here’s Tomi again with his take on the game:
I’ve always liked Sudoku games and this is a really well built app. It feels very natural to fill the Sudokus and with “insane” difficulty level it gives some challenge (assuming you turn off all the hinting functionality).
I have just one gripe (which is pretty good by the way!), I think most of the time it makes Sudokus that can be played through without guessing, but sometimes it seems that does happen that you must guess at one point. Maybe that’s just what the insane level is about but “hard” feels too easy.
Speak for yourself Tomi, but the hard levels are quite hard enough for me! Aenigma is available on the Jolla Store, OpenRepos and Chum.
Heebo
Heebo is a bright and colourful puzzle game that’s like a cross between Bejeweled and Boulderdash. Originally writen by Mats Sjöberg with graphics by Niklas Gustafsson, it started out as an app for the Nokia N9, later being ported to Sailfish OS by Kimmo Lindholm (kimmoli) who now maintains it.
Tomi describes the game as
a puzzle game where you drag these shapes with faces on to reorganize them so that you get a row of three or more and those disappear and give you points. New shapes drop down from the top to fill the gaps.
This is a Meego classic. I played this already on the N9. This is one of those games where you don’t have to think too much most of the time but sometimes it does give some challenge to your pattern recognition engine! Also there is enough animation and decoration to make it feel like a proper game and overall I think it feels quite solid.
The graphics are certainly bright, although personally I find the faces staring out at me from the circular, tringular, square and pentagonal blocks a bit menacing. especially the way they all blink together as the blocks fall into place. But maybe that’s just me?
As Tomi alludes to, it’s also not an especially challenging game. The aim is to get through the twenty levels, although in practice there doesn’t seem to be any fail condition. In case you run out of moves, the pieces are rearranged, but without forfeit. A touch of extra jeopardy can be added by activating the punishment for wrong flicks, which essentially locks a random piece in case you attempt to perform a move that doesn’t result in a removal. But ultimately this is game more about the progress than the challenge.
Heebo is available on the Jolla Store and with an aarch64 version by Jukka Hyytiälä (jukkah) available on OpenRepos.
WORDLE
Another game by Slava Monich (slava), this his most recent release, a cover-version of the now famous WORDLE game. Here’s Tomi with his description of how the game plays.
The aim is to guess a five letter word and you have six tries. Every time you guess you get some information about the word you are trying to find out, i.e. which letters it contains and where they might be.
As Tomi points out Slava’s version does bring something new, besides being a Sailfish native app.
This app is based on someone else’s game idea but, again it extends that by providing dictionaries for other languages than just English.
This was covered very recently in the community news and back then it wasn’t available for 64-bit devices. Now that it is, I got immediately hooked. It’s very addictive. But that’s also the worst part of this: that you can accidentally spend a lot of time playing it. It’s also nice that you can switch between Finnish and English dictionaries to practise other languages. I also tried Swedish but I feel I don’t remember enough words any more unfortunately.
Things move fast in the tech world and since we covered it in the newlsetter the original Web-based game has now been bought by the New York Times for a price “in the low seven figures”. If that’s anything to go by, it must be a good game.
WORDLE is available from the Jolla Store, OpenRepos and Chum.
Roundup
As you can see, if you’re into puzzle games then Sailfish has plenty to offer. Adding Android games to the mix leaves no shortage of other game types as well. We couldn’t possibly cover them all here, but we tested several other Android games, including Sky: Children of the Light, Race the Sun, Bejeweled Blitz, Bejeweled Stars, Peggle and Tiny Tomb, all of which are available for at no cost with ads. They all ran well using AppSupport.
If there are other games you enjoy playing on your Sailfish OS phone, do leave a comment and share your experience. We’d love to hear about them.
Please feed us your news
This is a community update, and frankly we can’t always keep up with all the exciting stuff happening in the Sailfish community. Plus, the less of this we have to actually write ourselves the better. So please help us out by posting your Sailfish news updates to the forum as a reply to this post. We’ll collate as much of it as possible into one easily digestable post for the next update.
And don’t forget to join us at the community meeting every other Thursday on IRC. It’s a great place to discuss any of the content you see here, or to share your ideas for future updates. The next meeting will be on the 31st March, full details here.
