Before the competition I posed the question, “What if our team submitted an mobile only game?”

Really, due to the long approval time for Apple apps, that meant, “What if our team makes an entry that only works on Android?”

Our concern was the tool-chain we use for everyday development which targets iOS/Android (and targets them well) may limit the number of players and therefore the number of reviews. We received mixed responses via LD comments, Reddit and Twitter to the question with almost as many saying “don’t bother” as people saying “I’d play it.”

In the end, we came up with list of three rules for what we wanted to see out of our Android entry:

A good reason to be mobile.

We decided early on, whether it was touch, tilt, camera, etc., our entry needed to be designed to be played on a mobile and not just a mobile version of a desktop idea. We chose a tilt to move, touch to jump platformer with a twist. You control two characters who are chained together and–depending how you have your device turned–you control whoever is on top and drag whoever is on bottom. Flip the device and the roles (and gravity) flip as well.

Easy to download and play

We posted the APK on our own server and posted it on the Google Play store, making sure that no permissions were needed to download and play. We also targeted Android 2.3.3 and limited the frame rate to 30fps. So, outside of needing hardware accelerated OpenGL, the system requirements remained very low. Th game played just fine on a $50 Samsung Reverb. Some respondents also mentioned adding a QR code to the google play link which we did in our main screenshot.

Show me… something

We pushed a YouTube video (which I’m currently re-building) the second we pushed the entry, in hopes that people who couldn’t play would see (and maybe share) our entry. After three days we have 75 views so we are seeing some traction there.

Results

I’d say we are pretty happy so far. We rated about 15 games a day, off and on and would get about 10 ratings a day. Comments are pretty positive, even from those who only watched the video. Friends and family drove our download numbers up, with about 40 total downloads as I’m writing this.

So if you have an Android device lying around, check us out.