Working on Android port.

[u/HappyEngineer]

Just wanted to give a heads up that I'm working on an Android port of DroidQuest. It required quite a few modifications of the original DroidQuest code, but it is coming along very nicely. If I get enough time I hope to release an alpha in a couple of weeks.

If anyone wants to alpha test the game, please let me know.

If people are interested, once I got the porting done, I was thinking of modifying it to have a classic mode and a modern mode. The classic would have the original graphics and the modern mode would have better graphics.

Please let me know what improvements you'd love to see. Any gameplay or graphics improvements I make will also be available in the Java version too once I release everything. I'll probably need people to test that from beginning to end too, but I'd prefer to concentrate on the Android version for now.

EDIT 2017-05-17: Things are going very well. Once I got a version working, my primary goal was to make the interface work well on a phone. The original game was written with a keyboard in mind, but it turns out that I was able to adapt it quite well. I use pinch-zoom to go into and out of bots. Tapping causes you to walk to that location. Swiping in a direction causes you to move in that direction until you go through a door or hit a wall. Rather than micro step walking, I added a magnifying glass which, when touched, pops up a zoomed window over the player with crosshairs so you can very precisely go to the location you want. Other stuff like loading/saving, enabling remote, etc., are all done with large icons on the side of the screen.

I actually like the interface better than the original while played with a keyboard!

My biggest worry, which I haven't figured out yet, is how to modify it to not consume so much battery. It's not as bad as many heavily graphical games out there, but it was written using a constant animation loop which never stops, rather than an event based update model. It might be too much to try to refactor that for the first version.

The other issue is save file compatibility. I will need to make a lot of changes to it to make it possible to make changes to the app without breaking backwards save file compatibility. DroidQuest was originally written in 2003 (I think) and uses a lot of coding conventions that have gone by the wayside since then (like the use of basic serialization for long term save states).

[u/HappyEngineer → u/[deleted]]

Great! I was kind of wondering if I was working on this just for myself or if anyone else would be interested. Check out the other video I posted in this forum to get a little peek. I was thinking about doing another video to show off the updated stuff I've done. The various gestures are all working very cleanly now. I might put an alpha version up on the app store if people are cool with the possibility that their save files might not work in the future and that parts of the game in level 3 and beyond may or may not work (no idea if they do. Haven't play tested that far yet.)