Configuration file for an Android game to test/tweak games in comfortable way

Question

My team is on its way to create our first game for Android and we're discussing a lot of things concerning the game's development. We've got one person which will test the game throughout the whole process. Usually, during the testing process, we give the tester an access to configuration file which contains a lot of constants that are used in the game.

But on Android, however, everything is deployed to an .apk file. Therefore, we cannot simply let the tester edit a traditional configuration file for testing, because the whole package needs to be rebuilt. It makes the tweaking process a lot less comfortable. Should we then create a function which would read a plain text file from a strictly set location (on phone or sd card) or can you think of any better solution? How do the other companies in Android games industry do it?

What is more, I'd like to mention that we will be developing the game with Marmalade - so if there's a solution that is especially good or bad while using Marmalade, please take it into account.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I guess you could set all your constants in a SharedPreference object. This way those constants would be both user-editable (with a default value) and saved between two runs.