Talking about his personal project Replica Island - made in his spare time - Google's developer advocate Chris Pruett pointed out some of things studios need to think about when making Android games.

The caveat to his talk at the GDC Smartphone Summit - entitled Building a Successful Android Game - Pruett said when the game was developed, the only Android device available was the original G1.

Also, as a 2D side scrolling game Replica Island was more of a DIY retro project rather than providing a blueprint to make Android's Infinity Blade, although the free game has been downloaded over 1.6 million times.

And, the source code is now freely available from Replicaisland.net for developers who want to check it out. 

Think early

Key decisions Pruett made concerned dealing with different screen resolutions and control methods, the two things he says are key for developers to consider.

"I assumed there would be no standard for screen size resolution, so the art just scales according to the height of the screen, and that worked with my game design," he explained.

"This has enabled Replica Island to run on pretty much every Android device," Pruett said.

A less successful assumption was that all devices would - like the G1 - have a trackpad, which proved completely wrong.

"I've had to update the game to add support and the ability to customise controls and now it supports trackball, tilt, virtual pad and keyboard," he said.

"I think you can play the game on every Android device ever. It should even work on the Xperia Play."

On the up

His two other assumptions were that the G1 would be the lowest powered Android device, and that OpenGL would be the fastest way to draw 2D graphics.

The former is true and latter also on low end devices, although on high end devices, you can now send the pixels direct to the CPU faster. But with Replica Island only supporting OpenGL ES 1.0, and not requiring massive performance, there was no reason to change this.

As an aside, Pruett also pointed out that each mobile GPU company has proprietary texture compression technology, none of which are compatible, which can create problems, if your game involves a lot heavy art content.