It's been a little while since we talked about Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage's Android plans so we wanted to give you a little update.
To recap we currently have a team working on the Android version and the iOS team have been working on two updates for the game in the form of an Achievements/Challenges based update and the next level pack!
All areas are progressing smoothly but this time we want to let you know a little more about the Android side of things.
The basic port of Icebreaker was up and running on Android in about a week but even then we knew it was going to be hard work to get to the point that we could actually release it. There are many, many small differences that have an impact on the Android build. The most obvious is the screen sizes and resolutions available on Android compared to iOS. The game has two set levels that it scales to and it does not follow a character so getting this working has meant a lot of adjustments and testing...Peter literally has a pile of Android devices on his desk covering all the major variations we are supporting. Beyond this there is a proper testing team hired that go through everything we do with a fine tooth comb so even more devices are tested on beyond what we have in the office.
We have (touch wood) sorted out everything for the screen sizes now and it's been tested to verify this. There are however still more things we need to do. By the time this is out we expect the iOS version to have received an update and we want at launch the Android version to be every bit as good as the iOS one. Currently the Android build does not include any of this so we need to merge the more up to date iOS game data and Android data to make a build that contains updates and Android specific elements. We also plan to hook the achievements to Google Plays achievement system!
If you missed the previous news we're pleased to say that we also plan to launch the Android version on the Amazon App Store. There is a little work to hook a few things up here too but we felt it was worth it to get it on as many devices as possible!
Finally we want to best set peoples expectations correctly for which devices you can expect us to support. We built Icebreaker on iOS to run on a 3GS and it took some optimising to make that run well. With that in mind your phone would have to be a better Android equivalent device. The same goes for screen dimensions...if you have less than 480 x 320 pixels then it was too hard to cater for sorry. To give you some real life phone examples we have tested it personally on a Samsung Galaxy S2 and it runs fine. For those interested here are the full list of devices we tested it on internally at Nitrome:
Full list of devices tested by Nitrome:
- LG E610
- Samsung Galaxy s2+
- Samsung Galaxy s2
- Samsung Galaxy s3
- Samsung Galaxy s4
- Nook HD
- Nook HD+
- Kindle Fire
- Kindle Fire HD
- Nexus 4
- Nexus 7 (2012)
- Nexus 7 (2013)
- Nexus 10
*Please note that the list of devices used by the actual testing team Rovio supplied is far, far greater!
The other things that affect the support of your device are the processor. We only support arm7 devices (which is the same as the iOS build).
Operating system wise we require 2.3 (gingerbread) or above in order to run.
We know you're going to ask about price but we're not revealing that until release I'm afraid but I wouldn't expect any nasty surprises.
So that's it for now. Unfortunately it is still impossible to say when we expect it to be ready but we're making good progress!
