Very Angry Robots Android Edition –Update 8

What’s New This Time?

Progress has been slow recently, but the project is beginning to regain its momentum, not least because I’ve had a little bit of time off. A lot of the slow-down was caused by my rather slow transition from an older version of libgdx to the current one.

Latest, greatest version of libgdx

Recently libgdx has been in a state of flux, but today I upgraded to the latest and greatest version, libgdx 0.81 which was uploaded yesterday. Mario and Nate have done sterling work on it and I can’t state enough how much I appreciate their efforts. There are a lot of features in there that I don’t use, such as the Sprite class, mostly because it wasn’t in early versions and I’d already got things working well enough when that was added. It’s quite possible that I’ll adopt some of those features later, but now I’m concentrating on adding features to the game rather than overhauling the code. If it ain’t broke…

High Scores

When the game ends then the player will be prompted to enter their name if they made the top ten. The scores are stored on the phone’s SD card, so they’re persistent between games. If there’s enough demand for it then a future version will also have online high scores via Scoreloop or OpenFeint.

What’s next?

The plan for this project had 8 milestones. This was the 8th milestone, but there are a few more things that I’d like to do before declaring it complete.

Controls. There is only one control method. This is highly unsatisfactory, because even I get annoyed by the current one. I’ve been listening carefully when people have made suggestions, and looking at what other games do. Now I can concentrate on adding a few more. Of course, if you have any suggestions then please leave a comment.

Music. My friend MacUK wrote a whole piece of music for this game. Shamefully I haven’t added it yet, but I’m going to once I can figure out how to reduce it.

Transitions. There are currently no transitions between screens. These were present in the web version and I think they should come back.

Older versions of Android. Not sure about this one, but if can get other control methods working then it might be possible to reduce the requirements, although I’m not sure if it’ll go as low as Android 1.5.

Online scores. I’m intrigued by the possibility. There seem to be a few options available now, so I might just take a look.

Better scaling. The underlying resolution of the game is 480 x 320, which is what was available on the original T-Mobile G1. This is a 4:3 aspect ratio. There are now many phones out there with vastly different screen resolutions and aspect ratios. For example, the game looks stretched on a Nexus One, with an 800 x 480 screen and a 5:3 aspect ratio, and will no doubt look a little cramped on smaller phones like the HTC Wildfire which has a 320 x 240 screen and a 3:2 aspect ratio. Ideally the game should have an option to keep it scaled to the original 4:3 ratio.

Download it here

Scan the QR code below or click on it to download the latest APK. As before you’ll need a phone running Android 2.1 or above.

Comments?

If you have any thoughts on the game then please let me know in the comments. And if you can beat my high score of 5350 then you’re doing very well.