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

Game mechanics


To explain the mechanics of Lilypads, let's begin by showing a concept image with the main game objects.

Each game level in Lilypad is represented by a pond from a top view where a number of lilypads lie. Grof can jump from one lilypad to an adjacent one.

Insects may be scattered between lilypads, so that Grof can eat them as he jumps from one lilypad to the other:

Lilypad is played by tapping on the lilypad the player wants Grof to jump to. The following screenshot represents the player tapping on a lilypad to have Grof jump on it:

Each pond is a game level that challenges the player with a given configuration of a given number of lilypads.

Grof can jump to any adjacent lilypad in the eight cardinal directions, as shown in the following figure:

Lilypads sink after Grof has jumped on them, so that the player must resolve each scheme by jumping on each lilypad only once.

To clear a level the player must find the solution that fits the scheme given by the configuration of lilypads...