The Battle of Screen Sizes: Building Munch O Crunch Run for Every Device (part 3)

Ahh, the amount of different phone and tablet sizes is crazy! This absolutely drove me nuts. When building Munch O Crunch Run, one of the biggest challenges I faced was getting the game to look and play right across different devices. The camera zoom and screen scaling in Unity were never quite the same between an iPhone, iPad, or an Android device. Unity does a pretty good job at automatically scaling things up and down, but there are always exceptions, and some of them can completely change how your game feels.

For example, on an iPad Pro, the screen ratio is almost square, while on something like a Galaxy Z Fold, it’s extremely wide. Within the game you have two major visual layers: the level (or scene) and the UI (user interface). The UI can be anchored to specific parts of the screen, say, a button anchored to the top-right corner will always appear in that corner regardless of the device size. But that’s only half the battle. You also need to consider button size and placement, because on a smaller device those same buttons could overlap important gameplay areas or make controls feel cramped.

Then comes the camera itself. In Unity, you can set the zoom level and let the engine scale the game for different devices. You can also define a camera boundary (camera area), which ensures that players only see the intended playable space and not any empty gaps outside the level. If all screens were the same aspect ratio (say, a perfect 16:9), this would be easy, but they’re not. Every manufacturer seems to have their own unique shape and size.

The temptation is to just lock everything to 16:9 and move on. But that leads to black bars or weird UI placements. For instance, on the Galaxy Z Fold, the player might see giant black bars on either side and the buttons pushed awkwardly toward the centre, not a great gameplay experience. This might be fine for a simple one-button game, but as soon as you have multiple inputs or movement controls, things start to feel uncomfortable.

After a lot of testing, I found a camera zoom level that looked great on phones. Then I tried it on a tablet, and suddenly, everything looked zoomed in way too close! The scaling ratio had changed dramatically because of the tablet’s nearly square screen. My first solution was to add a camera zoom option to the settings menu. Players could set their preferred zoom level, zooming out on larger screens to make gameplay easier. It worked well, but there was still a problem: what if players never adjusted it?

That’s when I built a dynamic scaler system. When you open Munch O Crunch Run, the game automatically detects whether you’re playing on a phone or tablet and sets the default camera zoom accordingly. This helped maintain consistent gameplay and visuals across devices without forcing the player to do any setup themselves.

It was a long process of trial and error, but I learned a lot about adaptive design and camera management in Unity. In the end, every phone, tablet, and foldable screen now feels right, which was a small victory in itself!

The middle image is default size for reference.

Building for mobile is always a balancing act, but solving these kinds of problems is what makes game development so rewarding. Every challenge teaches something new, and now Munch O Crunch Run looks great no matter what device it’s played on.

Andy Cox