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[The Hug]

Working on an Android game tentatively titled "SpaceDrop". Pretty much, a lone spaceman must use awesome accelerometer controls to dodge space-dangers as long as he can. I've done a number of small almost-game projects on my own before, but it looks like this will be my first complete, released game. Will probably cell it on Android market for 99 cents. Early screenshot on its way!

[The Hug]

Accelerometer controls work. The Asteroids move, not the player. The spaceman always remains in the center as asteroids fly by. I kind of like this, but might make the spaceman move just a little bit to make everything more dynamic. The score just increments over time.

Next step is to actually implement collision with the obstacles. At the moment they do't do anything. Along with this will be state changes, essentially a "You Lose, here's your score, tap to go again" page that comes up when you hit something.

Later steps will be:

• More interesting/spacey background
• more kinds of obstacles that do other things (satellites that fly horizontally, etc.)
• Another game mechanic besides just dodging stuff, maybe collecting an item that confers temporary "jet breaks" or another power up.

I realize the shot is crap quality, and the game looks rough so far. Any and all suggestions are more than welcome!

[seanw]

Will the point of the game be to survive as long as possible or, for example, will there be levels you have to beat? Any thoughts yet on how the game difficulty is going to work if it's the former? For example, the game could be very difficult initially or the difficulty could ramp up as you go on.

[The Hug]

My thinking right now is that the goal will be mainly to survive as long as possible. I may include a way to get additional points by collecting bonus items.

Difficulty curve is something I have put some thought into, but probably not quite enough. I see it starting pretty gently, with more obstacles and possibly increased speed making the game more difficult as it progresses. I'm also planning on including more exotic and dangerous obstacles later on (larger black holes, satellites with lasers, etc.)

[seanw]

Difficulty curve is something I have put some thought into, but probably not quite enough. I see it starting pretty gently, with more obstacles and possibly increased speed making the game more difficult as it progresses. I'm also planning on including more exotic and dangerous obstacles later on (larger black holes, satellites with lasers, etc.)

I've been prototyping a few "survive as long as you can" style Android games and getting the difficult right can be tricky. If the difficulty takes too long to ramp up, it gets boring once you get good because to beat your high score you have to endure a few minutes of play that's too easy. If it's too difficult initially you can scare a lot of people away though. The obvious solutions are to offer a way to pick the initial difficulty and/or to add some extra ways of scoring beyond just surviving longer (e.g. you score points for picking stuff up).

[The Hug]

Thanks for the tip. Will definitely bring it into consideration. I should probably ask this one StackOverflow or someplace more programming-specific, but how are you dealing with handling multiple screen sizes? At the moment I am getting the size of the display, and placing all game objects in relation to that. The player appears near the center, the obstacles are spawned in an area relative to screen size, etc. The problem is that this will give an advantage to players with larger screens, who will simply see more of what is going on. The most obvious solution is to use smaller assets in my assets folders for smaller screens, but I am nervous about how this will affect things like movement speed.

[seanw]

Thanks for the tip. Will definitely bring it into consideration. I should probably ask this one StackOverflow or someplace more programming-specific, but how are you dealing with handling multiple screen sizes? At the moment I am getting the size of the display, and placing all game objects in relation to that. The player appears near the center, the obstacles are spawned in an area relative to screen size, etc. The problem is that this will give an advantage to players with larger screens, who will simply see more of what is going on.

This problem is tricky too and there aren't any perfect solutions. The same issue exists on other platforms though so you can look for inspiration there. For example, multiplayer PC games have to support players using varying monitor resolutions and aspect ratios.

Off the top of my head you can try 1) make everyone play using the same aspect ratio by adding borders to the screen or 2) do nothing and let some players get an advantage. The first one can be annoying. The second one seems unfair but, for example, people do  compete in Counterstrike using machines with different capabilities and that seems to work OK. If you can, you could tweak the gameplay so that players with bigger screens only get a very small advantage.

The most obvious solution is to use smaller assets in my assets folders for smaller screens, but I am nervous about how this will affect things like movement speed.

You'll need to scale the graphics up/down depending on the screen size and your game logic needs to be resolution independent. This page is a useful reference: http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html

[The Hug]

ARGH!

Looks like this is now on indefinite hold. For some reason my Android phone is failing at USB. Having worked perfectly for several months, my PC no longer recognized the phone. It's either dodgey 3rd party drivers (Samsung phone) or I need to purchase a new phone, which is not in my budget right now. I've reinstalled all the drivers and reset my phone to factory settings, but no dice.

Perhaps it's better/easier to get a couple complete flash/web games under my belt first anyway. Frustrating. Ludum Dare this weekend though!

[seanw]

That's a shame. Can you not make use of the Android emulator in the meantime? You'd need to add touch controls for the player for this to be practical.

[The Hug]

I might keep trying with the emulator. I started another project: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=16548.0

Which I think is more interesting, and I am sort of glad to be using Flixel to get down to actually making a game, vs. screwing around learning how to make a game for a specific platform. Of course, learning new tools and becoming a better programmer does lead to making better games down the line, so I don't know...