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

What makes games fun


We desire to end this chapter with a section about a very popular theory of what fun is, and what makes games fun, by XeoDesign: a research firm founded by Nicole Lazzaro that helps organizations increase player engagement in their products by eliminating barriers to having fun.

Ms. Lazzaro is a world-renowned researcher in Player Experience (PX) who has been acknowledged as one of the top women working in high tech and one of the top 20 women in video games.

The following description is a breakdown of Xeo/Nicole's examination of what is fun in games. These are purely emotional responses that arise from specific game situations rather than from storyline.

This section is meant as a starting point for your research on the many theories on the subject.

The four keys to fun – the game mechanics that drive play

Lazzaro's theory is based around four types of fun, as different people play games for different reasons. Some people search for a challenge to test their skills, some...