I plan to start working on a two-phase build process for standalone Android apps.
The simplest method for standalone apps is to use the
mountObb function to mount an expansion file as a read-only file system. This allows games up to 2 GB without any modifications to the engine. Packing the game files into the APK would limit the game size to 100 MB at best (Google Play Store limit).
The editor could likely build an appropriate OBB file (opaque binary blob files can be literally anything; mountObb expects a FAT16 file system with the files stored appropriately in its file table), but building, signing, and aligning the APK are a bit beyond a realistic scope for now. However, I have had success in updating the Android project files to Android Studio, so a prefabricated AS project could be supplied. You would change a few lines in the string resource file and update the graphical assets, and then you could export your signed APK from AS, and upload the APK and the OBB file to the Google Play store. This two-phase building is actually rather simple, once the other steps are put in place. I'm finishing reimplementing some steps that I had done a few years back, but then the prefab AS project should be finished. At that point, a three-phase process would be available: 1) build the game data files with AGS 3.4.0, 2) build the Android expansion file using the
jobbifier tool, and 3) build the APK using the Android Studio project.
I intend to publish the Android Studio project files once I have finished implementing the downloader interface for ensuring the expansion file exists.
