Well, Andrew tweeted about our new project, so I guess it’s not a secret any longer. I’m porting his “Creatures and Castles” game to Android. He’s already released the game for iOS in the Apple App Store and for Google’s Chrome web browser in the Chrome Store. I hope to have the game in the Android Marketplace early next year.
So far, everything has gone according to plan. When developing for iOS and Chrome, Andrew was able to easily manage platform variances. For example, all iPhone / iPod Touch devices fall into one of two general categories – Retina, and non-Retina. When it comes to Android, it’s not quite that simple. A lot of wiggle room is afforded the hardware manufacturers.
I think of iOS development as a close cousin of developing for game consoles, where hardware consistency is your best friend. Android, on the other hand, is akin to developing for PCs. You’ll never be able to test every hardware variant, so you try to write code that adapts.
As time (and master Rollings) permits, I’ll try to blog about the technical details of the project as it progresses, and (more interesting to me) how my assumptions about the Android platform are validated or contradicted.
This week was spent with the family in GA, but I was able to get a lot of the menu code written, and do limited testing on a few hardware devices. Tonight, I added support for SVG images using a 3rd-party lib. Using vector art for the menus and options should make life a lot easier. We’ll see.