Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Like any other cross-platform development, porting to Android with the goal of publish-
ing a nontrivial app on the Android store(s) does require extra work compared to targeting
a single platform. There's no such thing as free ports. Each ecosystem has its own unique
programming interfaces, device capabilities, design requirements, user expectations, deve-
loper guidelines, publishing policies, and processes.
Most notably, on Android there's a much wider variety of devices, which poses challenges
regarding how to scale the app to a great variety of screen resolutions but also varying
CPU and GPU performance specs, different OS versions, and so on.
Fortunately, SpriteBuilder does make it easier to adapt to varying screen resolutions,
while the Android Xcode plugins allows you to use any Cocos2D feature and continue to
use many iOS frameworks. BridgeKit then gives you access to all the important Android
features without having to revert to writing C++ or Java code.
Yet it's not possible to map all iOS frameworks and functionality to some Android equi-
valent. For instance, to store leaderboards and achievements, you use Game Center on
iOS whose equivalent on Android is Google Play Games. Both have to be integrated sep-
arately. Game Center won't work on Android, and Google Play Games won't work on
iOS. In addition, both are technically too different (with different requirements and feature
sets), so it isn't feasible to have equivalents to a simple translation layer that maps Game
Center methods and callbacks to Google Play Games.
All this means you might have to do some extra work manually. You also might have to
write against the Android SDK interfaces directly with C++ or Java, but it's getting less
and less complicated every day, as Apportable is constantly adding features to the
SpriteBuilder Android plugins.
SpriteBuilder Android Documentation
You'll find more details than I can possibly cover on the SpriteBuilder Android document-
If you plan on taking the cross-platform route, you should definitely take the half hour or
so to read through the entire documentation. You'll learn a great number of things, includ-
ing what's possible, what the known issues are, and anything else you may have to con-
sider
before
starting with your project. Some things may affect design and technical de-
cisions, while others simply haven't been decided at the time of this writing, such as the
lowest supported Android version.
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