I'm new to developing Android games, but not new to developing mobile games (J2ME). I'm currently developing a board game, for a school project, with 2 things - a board and a spinning wheel (both are displayed at the same time). The user is able to zoom in/out and scroll around the board and spin the wheel. The wheel is also animated - resized during game. The board is build using tiles (2-4 different tiles on one image per board ) and the wheel is a image with numbers draw on it, using graphics.

My questions is what is the best practice to achive the best performance of the game (game has to run on every possible Android version)?

• Should i use Android canvas or open GL?
• Is there a mechanism for drawing tiles, animations or should i just implement it my self using drawImage()?
• Should i separate the wheel and the board into two different threads? Should i separate the wheel and the board in to 2 activities or put it in 1 activity and draw each part separatly?
• What would be the best way to resize the wheel during gameplay? Scale the wheel image (but the animation has to be smooth - opengl vs canvas)?
• What would be the best way to make the board zoomable - should i scale every image on the board when the zoom is detected or does android have some better way to do this?
• What would be the best way to make the board scrollable - should i implement a Camera that displays just a piece of the board or does android have some better way to do this?

Thanks for all your reply's,

Chers, J.

I'm new to developing Android games, but not new to developing mobile games (J2ME). I'm currently developing a board game, for a school project, with 2 things - a board and a spinning wheel (both are displayed at the same time). The user is able to zoom in/out and scroll around the board and spin the wheel. The wheel is also animated - resized during game. The board is build using tiles (2-4 different tiles on one image per board ) and the wheel is a image with numbers draw on it, using graphics.

My questions is what is the best practice to achive the best performance of the game (game has to run on every possible Android version)?

• Should i use Android canvas or open GL?
• Is there a mechanism for drawing tiles, animations or should i just implement it my self using drawImage()?
• Should i separate the wheel and the board into two different threads? Should i separate the wheel and the board in to 2 activities or put it in 1 activity and draw each part separatly?
• What would be the best way to resize the wheel during gameplay? Scale the wheel image (but the animation has to be smooth - opengl vs canvas)?
• What would be the best way to make the board zoomable - should i scale every image on the board when the zoom is detected or does android have some better way to do this?
• What would be the best way to make the board scrollable - should i implement a Camera that displays just a piece of the board or does android have some better way to do this?