Question

I’m writing my first Android game, and though the game itself is working well, I’m not too sure about some of the Android integration aspects of it. Specifically:

• Should I provide an in-game volume control?
• Should I hide the status bar?
• Is the Menu button generally used to pause the game, or should I provide an on-screen control for this?
• etc.

Basically I just want my game to do everything the “standard” way. I don’t want to frustrate users. Is there some resource (official or not) that lists recommendations for such things? Alternatively, can anyone give me a few important guidelines?

Answer 1

There are no official guidelines how to do this, but some ‘Android common sense’ would be advisable.

As usual, there is more than one way to do anything, but most of the apps seem to follow the following principles:

• full screen games (especially ones in landscape mode) seem to hide the status bar most of the time
• you should override the menu button, so it does not get pressed accidentally, but provide a quick way to leave the game
• back button usually pauses the app
• you do not need in-game volume control since all of existing android devices include a volume rocker, but make turning the volume off available as soon as the game (splash screen) starts, preferably give the person a few moments to turn it off before the music start (a ‘would you like to turn the music down?’ dialog would be nice)
• an (as usually on android) don’t count on anything and specify special game requirements (trackpad support, min screen size, …) in the manifest file

hopefully you can find some more resources online