Last week, I reported that I was making good progress on character customization options for The Dungeon Under My House, my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project.
I intended to continue the work, but there were some other things I needed to work on urgently.
Sprint 32: Pre-production and initialization
Planned and incomplete:
- Revise character customization
All that was left was finishing the hair customization menu and getting clothes options in there, and I would feel good stepping away to work on something else.
Instead of making significant process on it, though, I spent most of my development time dealing with Google Play’s annual target API policy requirements.
Each year at the end of August, Google Play updates the requirements for apps. New apps always need to target the latest official SDK/API or they won’t be accepted in the Google Play app store, and existing apps also need to update to support a recent SDK/API in order to support the ability to do future updates and for Google Play to offer the app to newer Android devices.
In practice, it means periodically finding out whether your already-shipped applications might need any code or configuration changes to continue to run.
In the past, most of my effort involved getting a newer version of libSDL2 which already supported the new target API, but I discovered that the latest version did not have any changes related to Android development compared to the older version I was using.
Which meant that the latest targetSdkVersion was still outdated and an updated libSDL2 wouldn’t be enough.
So ultimately, I updated the Android SDK and NDK to the latest versions, updated libSDL2 to the latest version, then modified the android-project from libSDL2 so that it used a newer version of gradle and I set the targetSdkVersion to 33.
I like having my apps be backwards-compatible, and so I wanted to keep the minSdkVersion at 16, but apparently the NDK won’t support anything earlier than 19.
I documented more details at https://discourse.libsdl.org/t/google-play-targetsdkversion-requirements-and-deadlines/, and it looks like soon there will be a newer SDL2 version that will support Google Play’s new target API requirements. It’s unclear if my documented changes post helped with that change getting made in the official library code.
So both Toytles: Leaf Raking and Toy Factory Fixer have been updated in Google Play, and I’ve made some changes to make these annual updates a bit more automated.
And now I can get back to creating hair customization options for The Dungeon Under My House.
Thanks for reading!
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