RoboWars - Planning the Game
In my previous post, I briefly outlined my plans to build an Android gamed. In this post, I will give more details about my thought process.
Designing for Android
The concept of the game (programming a robot to compete against other robots) is not a new one. There are a variety of computer games/simulations that offer a similar plot (Googling is left as an exercise for the reader). What is different though is the platform. Programming for Android (or any other touch-screen based OS for that matter) offers a few challenges that don’t exist in the PC world:
- Small Screen
- Touch-based Input
- Limited Memory
Small Screen
If you are targeting the PC game market, you can be sure that 99% of your users will have an 18” screen or larger, with a resolution of at least 1280 x 1080 or so. This makes it easy to just add another button or widget if you need one (Disclaimer: you should always follow good UX/UI design principles, but this is a topic for another post).
On a mobile device though, you are usually confined to a screen that is somewhere in the range of 4” long diagonally. The resolutions can also vary quite widely, especially with the new devices boasting retina-grade displays. Still, irrespective of the actual resolution, the “hit points” of the UI should be large enough for finger tapping, which leads me to the second challenge:
Touch-based Input
Tapping a screen with your finger is way less accurate than clicking with a mouse. In Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guideline, Apple advises to give tappable elements at least a 44px x 44px area for comfortable interaction. Furthermore, you need this interaction to be simple, intuitive and logical so users don’t create unnecessary usability issues for your user. With these constraints, you need to think differently and iterate multiple times on your UI design to get it right (at least I do).
Limited Memory
In the early days of ubiquitous computing (mid 80s to early 90s), proper memory management was a corner-stone of good programming. Unfortunately, as Moore’s law offered more RAM at lower prices, this constraint went away. Usually this is a good thing, but the problem is that most programmers (from the mid 90s onwards) got spoiled by this luxury and started producing bloated software without any regard to proper memory management. Now, the explosion of mobile computing, has brought us back to the olden days where good memory management can make a difference in the overall experience.
In the next few posts, I will talk more about the challenges above and how I’m approaching them. Stay tuned.
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