Jumping Droid published on Android Market

Apr

2011

Jumping Droid published on Android Market

Jumping Droid logo "Jumping Droid" is my first serious multi-screen project published with AIR 2.5. I took me a while to complete it, the game itself and the logic behind it is quite simple but optimisation work to get in working at 30 frames per second was really challenging.

The idea is based on the classic ZX Spectrum game by Albert Ball / Imagine Software "Jumping Jack" from 1983 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai-ocyGR_LQ. Few of my initial concepts didn't really work and I had to redo some parts of it from the scratch. One of the goals was to avoid using bitmaps designed for one screen resolutions only as I wanted this game to work on various devices including 320 x 480 and 960 x 640 iPhones & iPods as well as 800 x 480 HTC Desire or Samsung Galaxy and tablets with 1024 x 768. So actually I didn't really specified any target screen resolutions, the game detects device parameters and rescales all the sprites to adjust a device's screen layout and then converts them to bitmap data. This way the quality of all objects on a screen is perfect on every device and converting everything to bitmaps and using of the GPU guarantees great performance.

I think every ActionScript developer should try to develop even a simple app or a game for mobiles to check his/her optimisation skills. I never faced half of these problems when working on desktop projects. There are some things that are mobile-specific but many can and should be used in desktop projects as well. Well, to be honest I learnt a lot and I'm going to write an article about optimisation tips in general and for mobiles soon.

In the meantime you can download and play "Jumping Droid" on your Android device from Android Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=air.JumpingDroid.

If you want to check the memory usage or number of frames per second then fine :) I left the option for that in About menu on the main game screen.

If you don't want to or can't play :) then just watch the YouTube movies to see how it performs on Samung Galaxy and HTC Desire:

Let me know your comments, opinions or if there are any bugs that you found when playing it :) There shouldn't be any!

Comments

0 #7 Wojciech 2011-05-12 23:45

Thanks Thomas. I'm currently working on an article about things I learnt when working on the game and I hope to finish it in next couple of days. What I was doing is I designed all my assets for 800x480 as that is the resolution of my HTC Desire. Then at runtime I detect stage full-screen width and height, compare it to my original resolution (800x480) and calculating ratio to scale all my graphical assets to match the device resolution. I also reposition these assets to correctly fit device's screen. Another step is to convert all these resized sprites into bitmaps.

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0 #6 Thomas 2011-05-12 12:59

Fantastic little game and it runs great!

So I am trying to understand what you suggest here. I am stuck at the moment with my art assets and stage sizes. Should I be designing for 960x640, 320 x 480 or what is the best practice to be able to port to different platforms or even just the iOs since there are both the iphone 4 with 960x640 and the 320 by 480? What sizes do I use? I am making my first game and I am stuck on the best way to do the art in terms of resolution, stage size etc.

Thanks.

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