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[Interrupt]

Lately I've been working on a game for Android devices called Tilt Arena, which is a vector arena shooter with a focus on having a ton of weapons, making lots of explosions with them, and changing them constantly. It combines the gameplay styling of Super Crate Box and Geometry Wars to hopefully freshen up the arena genre. The game is meant to be played using tilt controls but has an optional touch input mode for those allergic to accelerometers / magnetometers.



edit: I'd include a video, but I don't have a phone fancy enough to do video out.


The game is playable now but only includes one game mode, survival. The short term plan is to add more unlockable weapons, more game modes beyond the current arena survival, and also to add new arenas for survival besides the simple rectangle with danger areas and per-arena enemies.

I'd like some feedback on the weapon selection and gameplay difficulty. I'm still fine tuning enemy spawning, so thoughts on that would also be extremely helpful.

Download
Official site

[sinoth]

The tilt controls were a little too imprecise for my liking, especially for an arena shooter.  I tried playing with joystick controls, but two things were annoying:

• No visual feedback for where the joystick is
• Auto-pausing when my finger slips off the screen

Having an option to enable/disable those two things would make the experience less annoying.

Visually the game is nice and I dig the sounds/music, but it doesn't seem to improve a ton upon the tried-and-true arena shooter genre.  Without some interesting mechanics it is ultimately forgettable.

Congrats on the finished game!  I bet Android development is somewhat annoying, having to accommodate such varying devices and OS versions XD  I'm running 2.2 btw on a Samsung Galaxy S.

Also, you might consider lurking around the forums and giving other games feedback.  It isn't the best to only have two posts, one an introduction and the second a game pimping.

[Interrupt]

Thanks for the feedback. Did you change the sensitivity at all in the options? I have it set fairly low by default as I've heard that it's both too sensitive and not sensitive enough. I'll add in the touch control options you mentioned, I didn't think people would miss a visible joystick but it's turned out to be a consistent request.

Android development is definitely annoying. Almost useless emulator, missing sensors, and screen sizes from tiny to tablet. For my next project I'll probably do my main development on the desktop and cross compile for Android instead of it being the primary platform.

Sorry about the few posts. I've probably lurked too much, in general, now trying to get better at actually posting places. Before I've always thought that nothing I was doing was neat or finished enough to show or talk about and that I wasn't the best person to be giving feedback. I thought I had an account here before but it probably died off due to neglect under a discarded nick.

[sinoth]

For my next project I'll probably do my main development on the desktop and cross compile for Android instead of it being the primary platform.

So what did you do this time around... did you develop ON Android?

[...] I wasn't the best person to be giving feedback

Pssh, I'm sure you have opinions right?  Then you're perfect for feedback XD

[Interrupt]

So what did you do this time around... did you develop ON Android?

Development was done with a phone plugged into a desktop / netbook and testing new builds on the actual device. It was important in the beginning when I was fine tuning the engine and getting things to run smoothly, but became a drag quickly afterwards.

Opinions are great, but they're even better when you have experience to back them up.

[Cheezmeister]

I like the aesthetic, but can't test it at the moment. Later, if I remember ^_^;

Note that Android dev from a desktop OS *is* cross-compiling since you're not running it on the same OS. Deving a desktop app and then porting it to Android might cut down your iterations, but could also throw some nasty surprises in when this game you haven't tested at all simply refuses to run on the device and you don't know why :/

Kudos.

[Interrupt]

Note that Android dev from a desktop OS *is* cross-compiling since you're not running it on the same OS.

Very true, there's probably a clearer term than cross compiling. Multi platform development?

Running every build on the actual device did force me to clean up parts of the game that I wouldn't have noticed had I been running it on the desktop, mainly all the work needed to avoid the garbage collector. Android really forces you to cache all your objects instead of creating / discarding them otherwise you get nasty hitching - having to go back and refactor everything after being 90% complete would have been painful.

[PlanetsFly]

Is this game still on Android?