Mobile Games Are HARD!

So here’s the deal.

During my brainstorming session for this theme, there was one idea I had that was far and away my favorite. The problem is that it would require me to make a mobile game- and I’ve never made one before. However, I knew Haxe, I knew Flixel, and I had attempted to set up OpenFL before the start of the compo, so I figured I might be able to set up HaxeFlixel and compile for Android. I knew from experience that, if I were experimenting with technology, it would probably take me half the competition just to make it work- and it did. However, I think I’m ready to accept that risk now. I’ve learned a lot of new things just from making this one game, and I have been enjoying myself.

So I successfully compiled- YAY! But the mechanic I needed mobile for hasn’t been working out as planned. I wanted to implement the theme as “you only get one row of pixels to view the gamespace”, so the players would have to see what’s going on by using the phone as a POV display- that is, waving it like this:

But after a lot of research into apps that did this sort of thing and research into the way I was accessing the phone’s accelerometer, I determined that it was impossible to do this with just one row of pixels in a way that the player can tell what’s going on (the above image was accomplished with a long-exposure camera and the Light Writer app, which uses far more screen space than the one pixel-width line I needed to fit the theme).

So I decided to go a different route: instead, you can only view one tile’s worth of gamespace at a time. I still wanted to control the camera movement here with the accelerometer, but after some testing and more research, it looks like I can’t prevent the screen from rotating during gameplay when holding the phone in the orientation that I’d want the game to be played- at least not through OpenFL. They purposefully eliminated that feature because iOS apps that used it were failing App Store submissions because of it (sometime later, I might try to write a library that does it for Android games).

But dammit, I started an Android app, and I’m going to finish an Android app.

So, instead of the accelerometer, I’ve settled upon a different feature that only mobile devices have: multitouch. That one actually seems to work the way I want it to! Now, time to make the actual gameplay. I might take this into the Jam so I have more than 9 hours to do all that stuff; I still like my idea and I want to make a good game out of it!