Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Screen sizes in Android

After playing with B1's iPad, I marvel at the quality of the images in the (paid) games and also how they can scale according to your preference.

Seeing that Dell Streak is out and more Android-OS based tablets are coming soon, I am wondering if I should learn to scale up my android apps. I am reading up on Google's directions on screen size, before I start drawing my images. I previously toyed with the idea of making different xml files for different screens for Burger Stacko, but figured the images were horrible anyway, so didn't bother.

So far, I figure out that if you need to manipulate screen size in your game, use WindowManager and DisplayMetrics.
DisplayMetrics metrics = new DisplayMetrics();
getWindowManager
().getDefaultDisplay().getMetrics(metrics);
Games wise, I like PopCap's Plants vs Zombies. I wonder how many developers and game designers do they employ? It was rather funny that PopCap claimed Microsoft wanted to acquire them some years ago, and then they only estimated the company was worth US$5M when the executives said they had US$4M in the bank at that point. Dude, bad luck. Anyway they earned US$1M from 9 days of sales of PvZ in Apple AppStore.

As for my misalignment struggles in displaying the scoreboard in Burger Stacko, a Development Lead advised me to use Courier or some other monospaced font. I learnt something new~! This is why I love hanging out with geeks and developers. :D

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