One of the questions I decided early on in my design for War Worlds is that it was going to be played in Landscape-orientation only. To be honest, I'm not really sure why I chose landscape, though I guess coming from a desktop computer, that seems the most "natural".

But thinking about it a bit more, a phone interface is naturally portrait orientation. You can hold your phone in one hand and navigate with your thumb in portrait mode - in landscape mode, you're pretty much forced to use both hands. That's fine for Angry Birds, but I think for War Worlds, where you're going to checking up on your empire frequently throughout the day (rather than sitting down for a solid 30 minutes at stretch) the more I think about it, the more portrait mode seems like the natural choice.

Now, obviously allowing the game to run in either mode would be ideal. And the Android SDK makes it quite simple to just define two different layouts for each orientation. But being the one-man team that I am, I don't think I can suffer the additional development and testing that supporting both would require.

So I've been doing some experiments with portrait orientation. Here's a couple of shots showing the difference between portrait and landscape mode for the starfield view:

And for the solar system view:

I'm not entirely convinced yet, but that may just be because I haven't tweaked the portrait layouts as much as I had the landscape layouts. I think I'm going to stick with the portrait view for a while and see whether it starts to grow on me.

What about the tablet?

On the tablet, the "natural" orientation is going to be landscape. So what should I do if I want to support tablets (and I do!). Right now (at least, after my setback), I don't have a tablet to test with. But playing around on the emulator, I think I can make portrait mode work there as well.

But for now, I'm happy to just "ignore" the tablet market. We'll see where that takes us in the future.

Last Point

If you're observant, you might also notice the "selection circle" is different in the portrait mode starfield view. I had a play around with adding an animation for the selection (so those two circles rotate in opposite directions). I think it looks pretty cool, and I'd like to add more of that kind of "flair" in the future.