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Looks amazing! I've recently undertaken a similar challenge, but I'm afraid that Android is going to be a lot more intensive than iOS since there are so many mo

Looks amazing! I've recently undertaken a similar challenge, but I'm afraid that Android is going to be a lot more intensive than iOS since there are so many more device shapes, sizes, etc. to deal with. I'm curious, how did you test and tweak for the great range of Android devices?

babuskov 13y ago
I developed most of the game on SGS2 which has 480x800 resolution which covers more than 70% of the market (depending on whose stats you look at). Then I tested on Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets, and bunch of phones that friends have and I've seen ugly streching effect, so I first tried just to keep the aspect ratio with black bars (letterboxing and pillarboxing), but this did not look too good. Then I enlarged the background nebulas and stars textures and the game adapts to the screen. If you have 16:10 screen it fits perfectly. If you have wider screen, there would be some free space at the sides. On Nexus 7 and 10, that's just some 10% and it's hardly noticable. On devices that are wider than 16:10, say some phones with 480x854 resolution, I simply extend the playing field upwards. So it's actually a little bit easier to play on those devices as aliens have more space to travel before they reach the bottom. I thought about increasing the initial speed modifier for those devices from 1 to 1.0675, but I did not do it. I somehow wanted to speed of the game to be constant. Using libGDX as a library makes testing all this very easy, because you can run in on your desktop as a regular Java application and you can resize the window to whatever you like. I have 1680x1050 monitor, so all phones and most tablets fit the screen. The only thing I regret is not having Nexus 10 at the very start and make the game optimal for 2560x1600 resolution. There are many popular Android games that do not support this fully (graphics get blurred). The only 2D game I've seen so far is Angry Birds Star Wars II. So maybe if I supported this high resolution, I would have a better shot at being featured in the Play Store, since competition is low. If this version goes well, maybe this is exaclty what I will do next: build a HD version.

babuskov 13y ago

I developed most of the game on SGS2 which has 480x800 resolution which covers more than 70% of the market (depending on whose stats you look at). Then I tested on Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets, and bunch of phones that friends have and I've seen ugly streching effect, so I first tried just to keep the aspect ratio with black bars (letterboxing and pillarboxing), but this did not look too good. Then I enlarged the background nebulas and stars textures and the game adapts to the screen. If you have 16:10 screen it fits perfectly. If you have wider screen, there would be some free space at the sides. On Nexus 7 and 10, that's just some 10% and it's hardly noticable. On devices that are wider than 16:10, say some phones with 480x854 resolution, I simply extend the playing field upwards. So it's actually a little bit easier to play on those devices as aliens have more space to travel before they reach the bottom. I thought about increasing the initial speed modifier for those devices from 1 to 1.0675, but I did not do it. I somehow wanted to speed of the game to be constant. Using libGDX as a library makes testing all this very easy, because you can run in on your desktop as a regular Java application and you can resize the window to whatever you like. I have 1680x1050 monitor, so all phones and most tablets fit the screen. The only thing I regret is not having Nexus 10 at the very start and make the game optimal for 2560x1600 resolution. There are many popular Android games that do not support this fully (graphics get blurred). The only 2D game I've seen so far is Angry Birds Star Wars II. So maybe if I supported this high resolution, I would have a better shot at being featured in the Play Store, since competition is low. If this version goes well, maybe this is exaclty what I will do next: build a HD version.