0.5 is now live on Google Play Store

Heads up, version 0.5 is now live on Google Play Store. This is the first version in probably seven or eight years that has actual new content. It's not much, since this is a checkpoint release towards actually finishing the game, but here is a summary of the new features:

• Added compatibility with modern and taller phone screens.
• Added vibration to the game.
• Keeping the screen always on or not is now a setting.
• Partially updated the user interface (work in progress, expect more changes in 0.6).
• Removed fullscreen mode.

Known issues:

• Text might not look as crispy as it did in versrion 0.4. I changed the text rendering engine again, but providing HD versions of the fonts was left out of this release. This is easy to fix and it might even be fixed as a patch before version 0.6.
• While support for taller phone screens (> 16:9 aspect ratio) has been enhanced in this version, support for smaller phone screens (< 16:9 aspect ratio) is still a work in progress. This will be fixed after support for PC is added again.

What's next? Items in the v0.6 column of my project kanban will be announced in a separate post, but the two things that I am working next are the following:

• Port version 0.5 to PC. This game is developed using a Java game framework called libGDX. Because it is made in Java, it is write once, run anywhere, and it allows you to build games for Android, iOS, PC and web using the same codebase. For some reason, an older version of me decided that support for PC was not worth and then decided to throw lots of Android specific code through the game. To port version 0.5 to PC, it will be required to first cleanup the mess, put the Android code in a separate unit again, and add the integration code for PC again.
• Publish version 0.5 in F-Droid. As part of these efforts, I will make sure that the pipeline is able to build with no hassle Android versions that are based on the open source edition, with no Google Play integration (not even a button to visit the Google Play Store). This game is free software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3 or later, so making the game available in F-Droid would be nice for those who prefer to only use free software.