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

Business models


So you have an idea, you know the platform to develop it for, and you know the genre and target audience of your mobile game. The next step is to decide how you will make money out of it!

When releasing a game on the mobile market, there are several options available to make it profitable. Deciding which business model to use is an important, and is a tough decision that will affect the commercial success of your product. Let's invest time in describing each of them and their pros and cons.

Premium

Premium was the predominant business model in the beginning years after Apple launched its App Store. It means that users are charged an amount of money, usually 99 cents, to download a game. It is used by some of the most popular mobile games, such as Angry Birds, Doodle Jump, or Cut the Rope.

Today, premium games tend to perform worse in terms of sales than games that are offered for free or with in-game advertising. On February 2013, Minecraft was the only paid app among the most...