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

Input interfaces for mobile games


The advent of the iOS and its revolutionary touch user interface is responsible for one of the most interesting aspects of mobile game development: the possibility of creating games that rely on very innovative input control systems.

Not only the usual touch actions, such as swiping and tapping, have been exploited to create the mechanics for innovative and popular games belonging to various genres, such as Fruit Ninja, Spider the Secret of Bryce Manor, Angry Birds, or Temple Run.

As the iPhone and the majority of smartphones are provided with sensors to detect movement, proximity, light, a camera, a microphone, and a headphone jack, these pieces of hardware have been taken into consideration by game developers to create games that were simply not possible before the advent of the touch interface and today's smartphones.

In the following sections, we examine the distinctive features of mobile devices from a mobile game designer's perspective. How can we exploit...