Or should I aim for tablets and leave it at that?

I personally do not own a smartphone, I am a dedicated lover of flip-phones. So my only reference to size is my PC monitor and putting my fingers on the screen to see if things are reasonably touchable at such a small size.

Image below: 320 x 480 pixels:

[attachment=29403:ui.jpg]

You can see the image is rather busy a lot of things are going to happen beyond this static image which does not include the light show of effects from the combatant chaos.

Not all, but the majority of interactive elements are on the image. Everything on the yellow bar is represents the player's controls, so ideally one would hold their smartphone as if it were a Gameboy/DS.

All the squares and green rings are interactive, but I am uncertain if the player team and enemy elements are an eye strain. Ignore that part because this is a wireframe with the final probably more akin to what the game sites look like.

The max size of the stage is 1920 x 1080 pixels without black bars and more left and right space.

Game: Combollision (Combo + Collision)

Domain bought no website.

Originally wanted to call it Combostruction (Combo + Construction + Destruction). It was close but the elements involved favored collision and it rolls off the tongue better.

From my own experience with the mobile market - i'll tell you it's a giant pain to deal with. It's becoming slightly more complex with iPhones since they keep adding different resolutions and aspect ratios, but the android world is really hard to plan for.

If you release the game and forget to compensate for 1 resolution, you will get tons of negative reviews from anyone running that resolution, which will effectively ruin your chances of success. As soon as someone runs across a review like "DON'T WORK ALL F**KED UP! DONT BUY!!!!!!", you're sunk, especially if its one of the first 20 reviews or so.

If this is your first mobile - I'd suggest going with Apple-only if it's an option, since its all the same hardware and only a limited option of resolutions. Your idea of maybe just going with tablets is smart too. There are probably less resolutions to deal with, although you'll still have to deal with a plethora of hardware, although less than you would with phones.

If it turns out that your game is successful on tablets, you can go back and tweak things for mobiles. Until that time, it's probably the best thing since it will let you focus on making good game with a limited resolution range and hardware specs, instead of constantly worrying wether or not your VRAM is exceeding X phone model's limits.

Thx for the feedback. I wasn't clear on that my aim is browser based, so it would be cross-platform and essentially online only. So, I am generally going for PC and tablet with the possibility of smartphones. But if smarties are too much of a hassle that's fine.

Ah. I've no experience with browser based games. I'm not sure what the modern standard is now-adays for it, but both unity web player and flash are going the way of the dinosaur. Thats kind of off-topic though.

When i had an android phone, it was fairly easy to zoom in and out of the view or lock it on an element, so I would think that you don't really have to worry about specific device resolutions. The same seems to be true with my iPhone.