Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Resolution issues with mobile games
When dealing with resolution, mobile phones present the highest variability. Classic
phones, those which used to be the most common devices some years ago, had
screen resolutions of 176x208 pixels, while recent iOS and Android based smart-
phones can range anywhere between 320x240 to 1920x1080 pixels for the latest
Samsung Galaxy S4.
There are even more options when taking tablets into consideration. Apple iPad
screens range between 1024x768 of first generation models to the 2048x1536 of third
and fourth generation. The Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700, the fastest Android-
based tablet available as we write this topic, has a screen resolution of 1920x1200
pixels; the Samsung Galaxy Tab and the Google Nexus 7 have both a screen resolu-
tion of 1280x800 pixels. The list of options is very long.
This exceptional variety within mobile devices poses two problems.
The first is with smaller screens of older cell phone models: when the screen size is so
reduced, every pixel is important. An artist must be very careful when deciding what
to draw and why, since inefficient use of graphics can create noise on smaller screens
which negatively affects gameplay.
The second order of problems arise when porting games designed to run on a specific
set of phones to other devices, and mainly affect the user interface of your game. As
we said, Android devices offer the highest variability: if you don't plan in advance and
take some precautions when designing your game for Android, you can find yourself
spending a lot of time adapting graphic assets and user interface from one device to
another.
Fortunately, Google offers several well documented tools to help developers deal with
such problems, and starting from Version 3.0, Android introduced elements called
fragments which support a more dynamic and flexible UI design for larger screens.
You can find what is considered the Bible of Google's UI design documentation at ht-
tp://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html .
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