The mobile segment of the video game industry has quickly become the best opportunity for a development team wishing to enter the video game market. Since the appearance of the Snake game for the Nokia cell phones in 1997, the number and quality of video games developed for mobile has constantly increased, while mobile phone hardware has improved dramatically.
The main factor that makes the mobile video game segment a very interesting opportunity these days is that, although not everybody has a console or a PC at home, in most parts of the world everybody has a cell phone.
Another factor is that the hardware capabilities of mobile phones have improved quickly. In about ten years, we have moved from devices with monochromatic small screens with limited input opportunities that could only run the simplest games, to devices with true color displays and gyroscopes with almost the same potential of consoles such as the PS2, if not better.
Also, for a team of people who want to jump into this industry, it is a good opportunity because, generally, it takes less resources to develop a game for mobile than for console or PC games.
In fact, the scope of a mobile game tends to be narrower than a traditional game, which means that to make a mobile game it requires fewer people for development, less time to get to shipping, lower investments to buy the tools, and in the end, less money in general.
Should the game go well and sell, the potential revenue can be very high!
On the other hand, the mobile segment is not necessarily a gold mine where everybody can easily find nuggets. The design of a mobile game requires several factors to be taken into consideration, as we will show you throughout this manual.
First, the device itself puts some limitations on what can be achieved. Though screens are getting larger and allow better resolutions, still they are not TV screens and monitors. The audio capabilities of mobile phones are several steps below their console or PC counterparts.
Game controls have to rely on the touchscreen or make use of sensors available on smartphones, which is an opportunity but also a constraint if we consider the flexibility of a common gamepad, or the combination of mouse and keyboard in PC games.
The experience of playing a mobile game on the bus is totally different from that of a console game played on the couch in the living room.
If we exclude the iPhone platform, there are literally thousands of different handset types on the market. Developing for a market this diverse can be daunting. Compared to this variety, the traditional segmentation of the video game market among the three consoles made by Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, is almost nothing.
Finally, and this is a consequence of all that we stated before, there have never been so many games available at the same time as there are now for mobile phones. This means that any new game for mobile phones has to face a hard struggle against other games which compete for a share of players.
The aim of this book is to offer a guide to those who are willing to test their skills in this potentially very profitable segment. It will provide useful information about the tools you need to develop, well-done games for mobile, how to take advantage of the limits of a mobile phone to design perfect gameplay, and which are the best business models to adopt in order to make money out of your games.
Examples of mobile games such as Doodle Jump, Fruit Ninja, and Angry Birds show us that the right decisions and the proper tools make success possible. We'll help you with that by offering you hands-on examples, extensive background information, useful insights, and a wealth of knowledge on the subject!
Chapter 1, Operating Systems – Mobile and Otherwise, describes the differences between the most important mobile platforms (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone) and the most popular software which are used to develop games and apps for each one of them.
Chapter 2, The Mobile Indie Team, offers a description of the main roles to be covered in an indie team of mobile game developers, the suggested formation background, and the tasks each one of them is accountable for.
Chapter 3, Graphics for Mobile, offers an explanation of the relevant 2D and 3D graphic formats used for mobile games, the techniques used to create such assets, and the most popular software to create 2D and 3D graphics for mobile games.
Chapter 4, Audio for Mobile, discusses the creation of audio for mobile games, the different audio types used in games, and the most popular software the professionals make use of to create audio for games.
Chapter 5, Coding Games, offers a description of the most popular coding and scripting languages used in game development, their strengths and weaknesses, and the description of the basic structure of a game program.
Chapter 6, Mobile Game Controls, focuses on the characteristics of the touch interface of today's smartphones and the use of built-in sensors and other external devices as input devices to control mobile games.
Chapter 7, Interface Design for Mobile Games, delves into the theory of user interface design and offers a description of popular models and techniques to create user interfaces for games in general and mobile games in particular.
Chapter 8, Mobile Game Engines, is about the most popular game engines used to develop games for mobile, detailing the strengths and weaknesses of each one of them. With this chapter we also begin our tutorial to create a game with Unity 3D from scratch.
Chapter 9, Prototyping, is focused on the techniques and tools used to prototype games, providing a list of useful software to achieve the task. The chapter also contains the second part of the Unity 3D tutorial.
Chapter 10, Balancing, Tuning, and Polishing Mobile Games, offers a description of the actions required to smooth the angles of a game's gameplay and the techniques used to achieve a perfectly balanced gameplay. In this chapter, we also get to the conclusion of the tutorial with Unity 3D.
Chapter 11, Mobile Game Design, explains the design process of a mobile game and delves into the specific difficulties related to designing games for today's smartphones, based on their hardware, the specific fruition models of mobile games, and the characteristics of the mobile market.
Chapter 12, Pitching a Mobile Game, is a practical guide to the creation of the presentation document of an actual mobile game. The document, which contains a description of the most relevant aspects of a mobile game, is essential to explain your projects to potential investors.
As the book will provide you with all the basic knowledge you need to develop mobile games, there is no prior knowledge or skills that are required to understand its contents.
On the other hand, we tried our best to make this book a practical guide to mobile game development and therefore a basic knowledge of any 2D and 3D modeling software, as well as some familiarity with the interface of Unity 3D is welcome.
As they are industry standard, we mainly used Photoshop for 2D assets, 3D Studio Max for modeling, and Unity 3D as the game engine to create the practical contents of this book. What follows here are the links to download the trial version of each one of them:
This book is for anyone who ever happened to have an idea for a mobile game but didn't know how to approach its actual development.
If you ever thought about creating an indie team of mobile game developers, this book will help you build it. We will also guide you in choosing the software required for mobile game development. We will help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of each mobile platform, defining optimal gameplay based on the specific characteristics of today's smartphones. Finally, we will assist you in choosing the right business model for your games and finally helping you to create pitch documents to present your mobile game ideas to potential investors.
If mobile games development is your passion, this book is the right starting point to trigger your career in the gaming industry!
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: All noncode files are held in a directory called Supporting Files, where you'll want to put images, text files, and other stuff.
A block of code is set as follows:
while(!gameEnded)
{
HandleInput(); //Reads keyboard, mouse or any other
//kind of input used by the player
Update(); //Updates game logic and, based on info
//gathered with the previous step
Draw(); //Draws graphics on screen,
//a process called Render.
}New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Once Windows Phone Game (4.0) is selected, type a name for the project in the text box and click on OK."
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