Porting Pygame Apps to Android

Since my son is on Thanksgiving holiday, I taught him two classes today.  I'm sure he would have preferred fishing.   The first class covered how to port one of his earlier Pygame desktop applications to Android.  The process only took an hour.  The game now works on his LG Optimus S Android phone and he can enjoy playing it while lying on his bed or after school with his friends.

His game, dropper, does not use any raster graphics.  Dropper only uses the primitive shapes from the pygame.draw module.  Despite the simple graphics and lack of sound effects, it's one of the most playable games he's developed.  It works quite well on his phone.

Here's an overview of the simple changes.

• import android module
• change screen width and height to 480, 320 (low-end phone screen)
• change player size to make it easier to dodge bullets on a smaller screen
• change frame rate to 30 fps to slow down the movements and make the game easier.  The smaller screen makes it more difficult to avoid the bombs.
• android.init()
• map the ESCAPE key in pygame to the physical back button on the phone.  He uses this to exit the game loop.
• android.key_map(android.KEYCODE_BACK, pygame.K_ESCAPE)
• adjust the height of the text boxes for the Game Over screen and final score.
• use free clip art to create the android-icon.png file for the Android app launcher
• use free clip art to create the android-presplash.jpg file for the initial splash screen that shows up prior to the game starting. 

In the future, it might be rewarding for the student to use Inkscape to create a logo for a mock software company.

Since the original game used the keyboard for controls, he added mouse controls.  PGS4A maps the mouse to the touchscreen.  This is so nice.  For this game, he created active areas of the screen to control left and right movement.  There's no instructions, but it seems intuitive to most people playing the game.

The original game also used the default system fonts on Ubuntu.  He saved the fonts from 

/usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeSansBold.ttf on Ubuntu to his build directory and packaged the font as part of the Android app bundle.