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

3D graphic assets


The advent of 3D graphics offered a brand new set of possibilities for game developers and posed new problems for the production of graphic assets.

As mobile phones incorporated the hardware required to run 3D games, mainly Graphic Processing Units designed to take care of graphics, mobile game developers turned to this new technology and began developing successful 3D games for mobile devices.

3D models

The production of 3D assets for games begins with the creation of a 3D model of a game object using software, such as 3D Studio Max, Maya, Blender, or any other you like. This is usually a basic 3D model with no detail. This model is then exported in a sculpting software, such as ZBrush or Mudbox, to convert it into an extremely detailed 3D model, or high poly, a very detailed asset, thanks to the use of thousands of polygons (depending on the importance of that specific game asset).

In the following figure, a beautifully detailed 3D model made with ZBrush is shown:

The high...