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# Sushi Loco, made with LibGDX
- URL: https://ivanarellano.com/sushi-loco/
- Published: 2017-01-17T03:10:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-25T13:48:48.000Z
- Author: Ivan Arellano Maurizi
- Tags: portfolio, game, android, mobile

In 2010, back in the early days of smartphones, a friend and I decided to create a different type of mobile game from what was currently available. Sushi Loco is a project we worked on from the ground up to make a side-scrolling platform game that uses the accelerometer.

## It's Open Source

I'm excited to have my largest personal project written released as open [source code on Github](https://github.com/ivanarellano/SushiLoco?ref=ivanarellano.com).

If you aren't inclined yet, are you here looking for a way to make a Katamari Damacy clone? Are you curious to see how linear impulses affect a circle shaped body in a Box2D physics world? Perhaps I've written similar features to things you've written and you'd like to see what conclusions I've made. Learn from this code base as I have from open source code.

## Early Day Android Challenges

My friend and I didn't have many options to create a quick mobile game for Android. We both had Android phones with an accelerometer, something that was a desired feature then, and that made our hardware specific enough to begin with. We easily ruled out the Android NDK because we didn't have an existing C++ code base to port. More so, the debugging and build tools were absolutely minimal or non-existent. We couldn't work with blindfolds on! Eventually we well understood that Java was the only way forward. This is why Sushi Loco is written with [LibGDX](https://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/?ref=ivanarellano.com). There simply was no other framework at the time that was fast, worked with native platform tools, and had a strong community presence with active developers. Times have changed and so have the tools. If I were to make a new project today I'd pick LibGDX, Unity, and Unreal as a starting point and then evaluate for my needs. Even the Android NDK is a solid option for an existing code base in C++.

## Skills Learned

- LibGDX game framework architecture
- Box2D physics for movement and hit detection
- Java on Android (back when public field access was a CPU optimization)
- Frustrum culling
- Texture atlas packing and retrieval
- Google Wave (RIP) to organize docs and collaborate with teammate