Development Log #009

Development Log #9 (Archived)

Resolutions – June 21st 2013

The project has been converted to libgdx and now uses OpenGL to render all graphics. The project is now compatible with android and using libgdx’s amazing library we can deploy to Android devices with ease. The screenshots seen earlier than today featured a border around the game screen which was for displaying temporary user interface items and will not appear anymore.

Here’s what you would see if your device had a resolution of 480×272

 

As far as I know when developing for mobile platforms it’s usually best to develop for the smallest resolution. When I programmed with JavaME the rule was more “develop for a single platform”, so this is definitely a step up. The new library in place for android development, libgdx, has made it incredibly easy to port code from native Java to not just Android devices but even HTML5 and others. This being said, I am currently working with an albeit arbitrary resolution of 480×272, which happens to be the Sony PSP resolution. This value can easily be changed to optimize the display for all android devices. As I mentioned earlier, developing for the smallest available resolution(within reason) for android devices you can make sure that the game screen never has to decrease in size, which in my opinion can look pretty bad. Any device with a larger resolution than the base would simply get just that, a larger resolution game screen.

Here’s what you would see if your device had a smaller resolution

 

We can see that above(smaller) looks a bit worse than below(larger). Also notice that the user interface, in this case the height panel which gives us information about the currently selected tile’s height in the form of “#h”, stays the same size regardless of the resolution BUT it maintains relative positioning which is just what we want.

Here’s the resolution using my laptop’s fullscreen (cropped for size limitations)

 

In closing, it’s still very early in the project’s development. The majority of the resources used are placeholders, i.e. the castle tiles are from Tactics Ogre as are some of the bushes/torches, but the underlying code is what matters. Also, you can see from the large screenshot above what is in store for the computer version of the game which will be able to display as big as fullscreen, which has a nice retro style.

Note: The images on some of these older development logs might show resources that are copyrighted or have other use restrictions. None of these resources are used in the current version of the game and they were never used in any version that was released at any time.