The small screens of mobile phones

Good morning everyone. Today I won't have time to work on my goalkeeper game, because I'll be at a restaurant to have our annual Christmas dinner with work. I'll be home late. This blogpost will be the only thing I'll do for the game today.

Yesterday I had a little more time, although my favourite team had extra time in the cup, which I was not expecting. And there are farmer protests worth being annoyed about. I'm not so much into alt right climate denier stuff. Anyway, the game.

What I did yesterday was finally get Unity Remote to work on my phone. I have no idea what an SDK, NDK or JDK actually is, but it seems that I needed to click Browse Three times before Unity understood it comes with this trio. I also had to tap the build number on my phone a couple of times. But now it works.

My game is initially made as a PC game with mouse control and Esc and the pause key to access menus, so I know there need to be some changes to the game to make them playable for mobile.

First, the screen is very small, compared to the wide screen of my monitor. This means that, with a screen covering the goal, the gloves are very small and it's very difficult to stop the ball from going in. I'll make the gloves a lot bigger, probably twice as big in any dimension. That'll not take too much time and effort. The same applies to buttons and text in the menus.

Secondly, while the mouse movement is ported to swiping, which I was planning to do anyway, the gloves will be quite far to the right of the finger, making them difficult to control.  I I'll find a way to control that. I guess this will be more difficult. I want the gloves to be right on top of the finger.

Thirdly, there'll be a leader board to track who is best. Games like this can get boring quickly if the core mechanics are under control. A leader board should give it little more longevity.

The work I'll be doing anyway, is the sounds. It does not matter which device is used to play the game. I need sounds. I also need some background sprite to block the view of the Unity blue void. Those will be made soon.  Now of to work. Till next time!