Deploying iPad games to iPhone 4+5

cph127

Dear forum,
We are in the middle of bringing our first commercial game from alpha stage to beta stage - and we are facing some serious issues a head. We are developing our game for iPad retina aiming for pixel perfect graphics (Scandinavian design traditions).

We are using the entire screen (1024*768) for gameplay and when we try to deploy it on iPhone 4+5, it does not fit the screen size. Black boarders appear and height is cut low. We have read earlier comments and suggestions around these issues. But all of the fall short of a viable solution.

We really need our game to be published on both iPad & iPhones 4+5 (universal build would be great - but not an necessity).

Do anyone have any recommendations?

If we can not get it fixed we are forced to transfer our entire game to another developer platform: Unity -

But we do like Game salad very much (it's rock 'n' roll development) and would prefer not to.

We will appreciate your advice and guidance.

Kindest regards from,
Thoms - Copi

Thunder_Child

I woukd goto GSHelper. @Braydon_SFX‌ has some great templates (free) that you can implement into your game. Depending on which platform you start your build on he has one to create a UB...it took me forever to understand all this UB crap that GS doesnt have plans any time soon to be able to work on a fix...except a squish. GSHelper is where its at. Goodluck.

The_Gamesalad_Guru

There is no easy way to do universal build as it has to do with aspect ratios. You need to understand what an aspect ratio is 4:3 and 16:9 for example. Aspect ratios are best learned by studying video production. Movie and television also have issues with aspect ratios which is why some movies are letterboxed. When you adjust the aspect ratio of images they distort and there isn't a magic way around it. The best route is to start with an iPad size build and layout the borders and layout of your game to allow for cropping without cutting out objects. In video we call this the safe zone. In video you shoot a wider shot knowing the extraneous material will be cropped off. This is an industry wide issue and if GS could come up with a way they would be rich as the television and media industry would be breaking down their doors to license how they did it. This is not a GS issue all tools and movie and television production tools struggle with this issue. I have a degree in television production and when one is educated on the technical aspects of this issue you know GS isn't to blame as in the business this is common knowledge among professional editors and cinematographers.

colander

Agree 100% with guru when you stop and think about it how can a software program like GS know what actors to move, change size, fit together, fill leftover screen with, etc after a aspect change. You have to tell it what to do using the options GS provides Letterbox, Overscan and Stretch.

Decide which option best suits your game and then design your game to suit. If you use Stretch there is nothing to do. I can't think of a game Stretch would suit and look right but there are plenty of people on the forums using it and happy with the results.

Apple and Tizen won't accept Letterbox but Amazon and Google still do at the moment. Again if you use Letterbox there is nothing to do.

Overscan is my choice but you will need to consider how it affects your game and experiment with a test project to see the effects and think about how you can do it. You can keep your game play in a centre area and have dead zones on the end which have art but no game play and get cut off on some devices. Or you can use code to change actor sizes and move them.

There are plenty of options it just takes some planing otherwise you will end up with two binaries one for iPhones and one for iPads like I did for my first game.

cph127

Thank you so much for all your comments. Gamesalad introduced stretch and it works great on iPhone 4 and is acceptable for iPhone 5:)

We are almost done and ready to publish our game "Escape The Page" oon App store.
Check it out in two weeks time:)