Book Image

Mobile Game Design Essentials

Book Image

Mobile Game Design Essentials

Overview of this book

The videogame industry is not affected by the economic crisis as the market expands each year. In addition to that, the mobile market offers the opportunity to small teams with limited budgets to create successful games that can compete with the big companies. This is a guide to help you take a share of this huge market. Mobile Game Design Essentials will teach you how to develop professional quality games for mobile platforms. You will learn how to take advantage of devices and their built-in technologies. Get to know the best software and programming languages to create videogames from scratch and detailed tutorials to get your hands dirty with the common practices of game development. Mobile Game Design Essentials introduces you to smartphones, their operating systems, and development environments. It describes in detail the roles required by an indie team of mobile developers, the most popular software to create graphics and audio for games, the most used programming languages, and the best game engines. It also provides several tutorials detailing efficient game development and prototyping. Starting with a description of the mobile platforms and the roles to cover when building up your own indie team, Mobile Game Design Essentials then provides a description of the techniques and software used to create graphics and audio for games and the coding languages and development environments used by programmers. It also aims to acquaint you with the best practices of mobile game design and development, by addressing the importance of the prototype-test-polish cycle and the analysis of the distinctive aspects of mobile game design. Finally, it concludes with a step-by-step guide to create the presentation document for your next mobile game. Mobile Game Design Essentials covers everything you need to know to get started in the mobile game industry; from collecting your team, recommendations on development software, to marketing and publication.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mobile Game Design Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Operating Systems – Mobile and Otherwise
Index

Chapter 11. Mobile Game Design

As we get to the end of our journey, it is time to channel all the info we have given you so far into what the main goal of this book is—to provide you, the readers, with the knowledge it takes to approach the practice of game design for today's mobile phones.

Game design can be daunting for a first timer but there is a methodology that breaks this scary process into palatable pieces. Remember, the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time!

We begin with a brief summary of the general game design process and then we will delve into the details of mobile game design, with its good practices and lists of dos and don'ts.

The last part of the chapter is dedicated to the theory of fun in games by Nicole Lazzaro, a popular researcher who studied how fun can help us designers to create better and more compelling games.

In this chapter we will cover:

  • The basic game design process

  • The dos and don'ts of game design

  • The distinctive aspects of mobile game design

  • Hardware...