Decisions

So I decided to develop a World War II game for Android, ignoring the amount of work that would be required. (Or unknowing about the difficulties...)

The game can played with the phone/tablet both in portrait and landscape mode.  It will adapt to the orientation of the device. This decision allows the user to choose orientation but it leads to more questions to be answered. My experience is that the platform dismisses the instance of the class that extends Activity, and creates a new instance when the device changes orientation. This behavior must of course be taken care of. But I'm not certain that the behavior can't be configured in another way.

Initially I wanted to have four unit types: aircraft, infantry, panzer and warship. Each unit should have a technology level. The unit types would, together with technology level, interact with each other in a rather complex way. Eventually I decided to only have one unit type, the infantry, and with no technology levels, for simplicity.

In the beginning I also thinked about the idea that a player should be able to intercept movements from an enemy. For instance, if Britain moves warships west of Denmark, then Germany should be able to intercept the warships with aircraft (that is, attack the fleet). Then again, for simplicity, the idea of intercepts was rejected.

In one stage, there was a dialogue, that enabled the player to split an army. Then again, for simplicity, the dialogue was discarded. The player can let armies merge, but can't split them.