NaNoRenO 2015 Entry: New Pisces - Android APK available now

Blog updates were on pause while I was finishing off my NaNoRenO game, New Pisces, which I managed to get finished by 31st March 2015.

You can download from:
http://sleepyagents.itch.io/new-pisces

New Pisces - NaNoRenO2015 - Sleepy Agents

I made an android version in addition to the standard PC ,Mac and Linux builds. The latest Ren'Py version (6.99 at time of writing) has made it much smoother to build an APK in Windows 8.1, in that it worked!

In addition to making a standalone APK file which can be sideloaded onto any android device I decided to go through some of the Google Play store setup. I made a publisher account via the Google Play Developer Console - https://play.google.com/apps/publish/signup/ - and paid my 25usd. (Just a comment on that, I think this one-time fee is a fair system which allows super-tiny developers and projects to get onto the play store, I really hope it remains a one-off fee and doesn't in the future move to an annual model. If you're planning on releasing on the play store it might be worth considering signing up for an account now just in case the system changes much in the future.)

Now due to the fact my game is closer to 100mb than it is to 50mb I had to create an expansion file - which I discovered is created in the same RAPT directory that Ren'Py saves the APK to and has the extension OBB (apparently stands for Opaque Binary Blob!). This would've been fine if I had read the documentation which the android configuration wizard clearly states you should! Doc: http://www.renpy.org/doc/html/android.html the bit at the bottom of that page tells you what to do to make a working expansion file! The bits of code build.google_play_key = "..." and build.google_play_salt = ( ... ) go into the options.rpy file (I put mine at the top of that file - after a failed attempt at adding them to script.rpy!). I wasn't 100% sure what to do for the salt so I made up some random numbers which I think is what is expected!

Google Play has a beta testing option, so I've used that to upload and test my game via the play store. I don't think I'll make the game public on the play store, this was really for my own learning. Oh and a quick nod to teamtreehouse ( http://teamtreehouse.com/home ) which is a great paid for elearning site. I watched some of the android dev videos previously which was good to get a feel for what I was to be undertaking!

The next post really will be about audio channels!