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# Testing the Game

Testing a game on Android is a three-step process. The first step is to create files that control how your game is displayed. Then, your game can be pushed onto the device using the adb tool that comes with the Android SDK. Finally, the game can be run using the Pygame Subset tool.

## Files

The android.txt, icon.png, and .nomedia files are required to ensure your game displays property in the Pygame Subset tool. These files should be placed in the same directory as the main.py file. If the game is in the mygame directory, a sensible layout would be:

- mygame/android.txt
- mygame/icon.ong
- mygame/main.py
- mygame/.nomedia

(Data files used by the game should go in the same directory as main.py, as well.)

### android.txt

The android.txt file is a file that’s used to control how your game is displayed, both in the list of pygame games and when the game itself is running. It is a Java Properties file, which consists of a list of keys separated from values by an equals sign. An example android.txt file is:

    title=Color Touch
    author=Pygame Subset for Android
    api=1
    orientation=portrait

The following keys are supported:

name
  The title of the game. Displayed in the Pygame Subset tool’s list of games.
author
  The author of the game. Displayed in the Pygame Subset too’s list of games.
api
  The version of the Pygame Subset API that this game uses. This should always be 1. If set to a newer version, the user will be asked to upgrade to that newer version (which doesn’t exist yet).
orientation
  One of “portrait” or “landscape”. This controls the orientation of the game on the device.

### icon.png

The icon.png file should be a small png file. It’s used as an icon in the Pygame Subset tool.

### .nomedia

The .nomedia file should be an empty file. It’s used to tell Android not to scan this directory for media files. If it didn’t exist, then image and audio files used by the game would be indexed and added to the various galleries on the device.

## Pushing to the Device

To push the game to the device, use the adb tool, which can be downloaded as part of the Android SDK. It’s useful to place the adb command into your path.

The game must be placed into a directory underneath the pygame directory on the device’s sdcard, using a command like:

    adb push mygame /sdcard/pygame/mygame

Once that’s done, the game will show up in the list of games in the Pygame Subset tool.

## Running the Game

Once the game shows up in the Pygame Subset for Android tool, it can be run. Touch the name of the game in the list of games to run it.

Debug messages can be seen using the adb logcat command. It may make sense to limit the messages to those originating from python, using:

    adb logcat -s python:*

If that doesn’t help in diagnosing the problem, use adb logcat to display all messages:

    adb logcat

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