android

Whenever I release a game on ios immediately people start demanding it on android. Some of them are polite and friendly but some of them are real dicks about it, like they feel it's their right to have me do work for them, it's really weird. The numbers I've heard from other game developers suggest releasing on android pays quite a bit less than ios, like 5-15% as much; shouting at me "ra ra ra why haven't you done this yet" doesn't really incline me to do what would essentially be charity work. Please don't do that.

Anyway a few years ago I did try porting Glitch Tank to android and gave up for a bunch of reasons. It did turn out to be really a lot of extra technical work, required some major hacks to get it to run at all, and when it did there were problems with the framerate, too much input lag for a quick action game, I completely failed to figure out what the problem was. Seriously I'm here to design games and make art not to do all this technical crap, I'd pay someone else to do it for me if I had money.

I mean it's not like ios has been great either, they've thrown away some of their advantages. When I started on this there were two devices to support - telephone and tablet - with predictable hardware, sensible resolutions / aspect ratio; now they keep changing that so there's no effort saved there. Every major ios version has broken one of my games and it's sometimes quite a lot of work to figure out how. But I'm kind of making enough money to live on now so hey it's still better than a lot of people's work.

Anyway yesterday I tried running Glitch Tank on an android again and it seemed to run fine?? Same device. Maybe an os update fixed the input lag thing somehow? Waiting until the problem goes away is my absolute favourite way to fix things. So I released it. Haven't tested on a bunch of different devices because indie so maybe there'll still be framerate problems or whatever for some people? But someone got it and said it ran fine for them so there you go.

This is not a commitment to android anything else. But of course I will pay attention to numbers when I am working out what to do.

Glitch Tank on android thing
Glitch tank on ios