Android and the Google Play Store

First tests on a real device

I finally have an android device for testing our game on android. It took a while until I found these instructions on how to enable USB debugging and get your computer to recognize the phone correctly. However, after that, deploying and debugging on the device worked like a breeze, thanks to LibGDX and IntelliJ.

It works surprisingly well and dragging stuff around has a good feel to it. But developing for such a small screen provides additional challenges. The UI will have to be adapted to make everything easier to see and touch. On the other hand it’s fun to play around with features like the accelerometer.

No PlayStore Developer

Last weekend we tried to officially become Google Play Store Developers, to be able to distribute our game over the Play Store. The biggest hurdle to overcome is paying the 25$ entry fee, before you can call yourself a proper (Google Play Store) Developer. The problem isn’t getting the 25$, but paying them to Google. Especially when you have no credit card…

The payment has to be made with Google Wallet, and they only accept credit cards. We tried it with a pre-paid credit card, called cash4web. They claim to work everywhere where you can pay with mastercard. Unfortunately it doesn’t work. So this dream is stopped for now, until we have a credit card.

Plan B

We will still publish a desktop and an android version of the game. We will probably provide an .apk for download, and people will have to manually download and install it. But we will worry about the details later.

Since the Play Store is ruled out for now as a distribution platform, we will have to search for an alternative. One store front I had on my radar for a while, but never really checked out is itch.io. Itch.io is a great marketplace full of independent games and game developers, so I think this will be a great place to start. And most importantly, they have no entry fee.

-Anton