You may have noticed that there used to be one more icon on our intro page, this one:

Against our initial intentions, we decided to drop the support for the android platform. This has several reasons.

There are essentially two types of Adroid powered devices on which the game could run: tablets and consoles. The obvious way of controlling a game on a tablet is by using touch which is really unsuitable for the type of game we’re making. Sure, you could use a virtual joystick which would be added as an overlay, but in our experience they do not work as well as a controller or even a keyboard plus you constantly obscure parts of the screen. The console we planned to release for is this thing. While we like the OUYA and the idea behind it, some experiments have shown that the hardware is not capable of what we’re trying to do. The fill-rate of the tegra which they used for the OUYA and the limited flexibility of the supported shaders are just not enough. (In case you’re wondering what we need the graphics power for, stay tuned, you’ll see, eventually…)

The other reason is that we have our own engine. This is something really great if you want the flexibility to change things around and do stuff other engines wouldn’t let you. But it comes at the price of having to implement everything. Even tough T.H.E was designed from the beginning to support android, and a lot of the core logic runs just fine on our favorite humanoid machine, the graphics pipeline is quite different and the abstraction and re-implementation takes time. And time is something we don’t really have. We already are way past our original schedule and there’s still a lot to do, so we decided to spend that time on the game rather than on the engine.

That’s it for now. We hope to have more to show quite soonish, so stay tuned…