Piles Now Playable on Mobile 📱

Last week I launched Piles - a brand new card game featuring a dastardly AI opponent. Feedback has been great so far, thanks to everyone that has been kind enough to share their thoughts! This week I've launched a new version of the game which makes it playable across mobile & desktop devices.... mostly anyway!

Making responsive video games is tricky, whilst game engines are making it easier for developers - it's still pretty difficult to achieve perfection. I've always found this particularly difficult in Phaser as too my knowledge, there aren't any 'built-in' tools that simplify it for developers - which is fair enough.

 Instead I've been working on a grid-based layout built upon scripts provided by William Clarkson. Essentially I create a grid, and then select the cell I want the sprite to be centred on.  Here's how that looks in practice:

It's not quite as easy as that though because you then need to think about the scale of each object too. Things will begin to look very different on a very wide or very narrow screen. I've got some if-statements to catch those extreme circumstances and the game seems to respond OK. But as you can see below, we're still seeing some issues, particularly around text...

But development continues. This week I will be spending my time resolving those aforementioned issues and also ensuring text and UI elements are more consistent. For too long I've stared at inconsistent fonts and sizes!

If you have any questions about how I handle the layout of things using Phaser, or maybe have some suggestions of your own.. get in touch, I would love to discuss!