Visitor is a game I'm building in Godot. This post covers setting up exports for android and some mistakes along the way.
I left off with the realization that I had to do some plumbing to get Visitor working on a physical device so I could test some touch detection. I googled around and found this link in the Godot docs on setting up the Android SDK. Thankfully I can (hopefully) just download the CLI tools and not the entirety of Android Studio (I just removed Xcode from my computer temporarily to free up some space and saved over 30gb (ಥ﹏ಥ) ).
After a short break to play a game of Duel, I returned to test the exported APK. It was rather broken, which is the second time I've (re)learned that I should be testing on device as soon as possible while developing. Ah well.
So - the APK was utterly broken, which led me to ask if it was possible to do live builds on device (which I was 99% sure was possible). Sure enough, once you enable debugging/development mode on your android, you can build directly through Godot.
Now, instead of exporting an APK, it seems that the Godot build is actually somewhat working. Unfortunately, everything is very janky. I was able to fix the aspect ratio, but things like the navigation is quite slow and the star generation seems to be quite non-performant.
Looks like I'll have to revisit the following in the near future:
- simplifying the compass mechanism (I'm thinking a single triangle/navpoint representing direction is better)
- fix janky performance - likely caused by the starfields, which I suspect are slowing things down.
- My algorithm for generating new starfields is mostly working, but every now and then the player reaches a boundary and the starfield hasn't generated yet.