Android Shaders and mobile devices (advice)

[tiny547]

I'm creating a game with day/night cycles on android devices and the game looks great with nearly full brightness turned up on my phone. I'm just curious if users with auto dimming on or with low brightness setting will find the game too dark at times and will be unaware that it's a setting and for that reason dislike the game?

Any thoughts?

 

[Bingdom]

It's better to keep the game at least partially bright, it doesn't have to be realistically dark. You just need to give the impression that it's night.

 

[tiny547]

It's better to keep the game at least partially bright, it doesn't have to be realistically dark. You just need to give the impression that it's night.

Good point. I just know a lot of games out there are bright and colorful which make them easy to play in all types of lighting, etc. I'm worried that the shading will restrict the player or confuse them. Ex. playing a game outside in the sunlight can make it hard to see the screen with a low back light.

 

[tiny547]

On a side note, I've read in the past, games that were already released on PC and later ported to mobile removed certain features like shading because of performance issues. I'm curious if another reason they decided to remove shading aside from performance was because of related lighting stuff. Idk..

 

[Bingdom]

Shaders don't run well on mobile devices, especially on the older ones and don't always look exactly the same between devices (that's probably got something to do with bit depth, not sure).