I bought my first tablet – a used Samsung Tab S4 for £170 – and it can run EBF5 smoothly at a massive 2560×1600 resolution. It’s really too bad that Flash on Windows never got the optimizations that Android and iOS got. Most gaming PCs can’t run Flash games at that resolution…
So the lesson is… buy a used Android tablet if you want to play EBF5 as cheaply as possible.
I gotta say though, that playing it on a smaller device with your thumbs is a bit more comfortable than playing it with a stylus. Tablets seem to be better for games that require less interaction, or only have buttons near the edges where it’s easy to reach them. Or uh… office presentations.
Hey guys, here’s some more concept art for a hidden object game, this time based around the Scottish countryside. Real levels would be a lot larger than this, but in image form, this is probably the most detail I can fit on a single screen.
Hey guys, stupidly long phones are popular lately, and EBF5 has been a strictly 16:9 aspect ratio game until now, so a lot of people have been seeing black bars on mobile. This isn’t so bad on phones with an aspect ratio of 18:9, but when it gets to 20:9, you’re losing 25% of usable screen space!
Getting rid of the black bars has been the most requested feature on mobile (except maybe for cloud saving, which is also coming soon), so after some reluctance at first, I’ve finally decided to work on it. I’ve decided to support resolutions from 16:9 to 20:9, because that covers most high-end phones, and isn’t a crazy amount of work (at the moment it’s looking like about 5 or 6 days of work). I’m not doing taller tablet resolutions because that would require twice as much work, and tablets are much less popular (most of the GUI has been designed for widescreen, so I’m in no mood to redesign all of that). I also considered supporting 22:9, but that turned out to be awkward and looked worse than just having the black bars (the maps can’t be scaled to such a width without horrible distortion).
So what’s changing? Player, foe and spell animations that reach the edges of the screen have been extended to reach further, and battle backgrounds are being extended too. The world map has been zoomed in a bit, and the menu now requires a button press to open. This has the advantage of making the map easier to navigate, as the tiles are noticeably bigger and easier to tap.
There’s also an option to lock the game to 16:9, if you prefer that for whatever reason. But I think the extra width looks pretty cool.
Is it worth a week of work? Probably not. But it’s a novel challenge and has been more fun to do than some of the other mobile features.
I’ve added the alternative equipment colors back into the mobile version of EBF5 – removing that Easter egg was a mistake, back when I was testing ways to improve performance. And while I was at it, I’ve added some new colors, since people seem to be into this sort of thing.
Hey guys. While playing the game Hidden Through Time a few weeks ago, I noticed that kind of art style would be quite easy to do in Flash, and I was in the mood to try something new… so here’s a mockup I did for a hidden-object game!
This scene is somewhat based on the countryside in Finland and Sweden. See if you can find the stuff! (click on the image to see a bigger one!)
