The games come to Android

On the itch.io page of seven games, next to the Windows, Linux and macOS packages, there is now an Android APK: Maze Lume, Micro Doc, Dark Cell, Countdown Clones, Standing Order, ONE — The Chain and QUOTA. It installs straight onto the phone, no store involved.

Google Play will come later, and further down we explain why it takes time.

The problem was not touch

We expected the controls to be the big job. Reading the sources again, all seven games could already be played with a finger: Standing Order has two virtual sticks and on-screen buttons, Micro Doc and Maze Lume are steered by dragging, Countdown Clones by tapping where to go, QUOTA, ONE and Dark Cell by tapping their buttons. They were born for the browser, and in a phone's browser you play with your finger.

The real problem was different: no project told Godot how to fit the screen. Without that, the game draws in physical pixels. On a computer that is fine, because a pixel is big; on a phone with 2400×1080 pixels in six and a half inches, a text meant to be 22 pixels tall ends up barely a millimetre high.

The fix is two lines in the project file, with one detail that matters: they apply only on mobile devices. Godot lets a setting take a different value per platform, and we gave the new value to Android only. The computer and browser versions stay exactly as they were.

With those lines the game always works on a 1152×648 area and scales it up to fill the screen; on a longer phone, like almost every recent 20:9 model, the game widens sideways instead of leaving black bars. Standing Order needed nothing: it already draws at 640×360 and scales itself by a whole number.

Two texts that ran off the screen, on computers too

To check the result we opened every game in a frame with a phone's proportions. Two things were off, and neither was the phone's fault.

• Maze Lume: the push button, bottom right, is 148 pixels wide. In English the label "PUSH (Space)" at size 28 does not fit, and the button grew to the right, off the screen. Now it grows to the left.
• Micro Doc: the first level's hint is a long sentence, drawn on a single line that was cut at the edge. Now it wraps, up to three lines.

Both fixes reach the computer versions too, with the next package.

Which phone you need

• Android 10 or later, with a 64-bit processor: practically every phone released since 2019.
• No permissions requested. The games use no network, no ads, no analytics and no accounts.
• Landscape only, and the game follows the phone if you turn it the other way round.

We chose to ship the 64-bit version only: adding old 32-bit phones doubled the file size (Micro Doc goes from 147 to 74 MB) for a share of phones that is now small. On a 32-bit phone Android only says "App not installed", without saying why: that is why we write it here and next to the download.

How to install

Download the APK on your phone. The first time, Android asks you to allow installing apps from that source, meaning the browser or the itch.io app you downloaded with: you enable it there, once. After that the game sits among your apps like any other.

If you had already installed Micro Doc or Dark Cell for Android: last week's builds used a different package name (dev.microgames), the new ones use com.microgames, the same we will use on Google Play. To Android they are two separate apps: install the new one and uninstall the old one. Progress saved in the old one does not carry over.

The version number

Every APK carries the same number as the version running in the browser: Maze Lume v54, Micro Doc v28, Dark Cell v75, Countdown Clones v8, Standing Order v108, ONE — The Chain v21, QUOTA v14. It is also the internal number Android uses to tell whether a file is newer than the installed one. The computer packages, which we rebuild in batches, may lag behind.

What about Google Play?

Our Google Play developer account exists but cannot publish yet: Google first asks for identity and device verification, and then, for new personal accounts, a closed test with at least twelve testers signed up for fourteen days in a row. The files for Play are already built, one per game.

One thing worth knowing now: the itch.io and Play versions do not update each other. Play signs apps with its own key, and Android refuses to replace an app with one signed by someone else. Moving from one to the other means uninstalling first.

What we take away

• What we thought was the big job, the controls, was already done. What nobody had ever set, the screen scaling, was the real obstacle.
• A setting that applies only where it is needed beats one that changes everything: the browser and the computers never noticed.
• The two cut-off texts were there before. We only saw them by looking at the games with fresh eyes, on a different screen.
• We checked the layout in a frame with a phone's proportions, not yet on many real phones. If something is wrong on yours, tell us the model and the Android version.