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.

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Mobile Game Design Essentials
Nov, 2013 | 358 pages
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Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mobile Game Design Essentials
Mobile Game Design Essentials
Credits
Credits
About the Authors
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Operating Systems – Mobile and Otherwise
Operating Systems – Mobile and Otherwise
Operating systems
Mobile operating systems
Summary
2
The Mobile Indie Team
The Mobile Indie Team
A matter of size
Key roles in a successful team
What it takes
The roles in an indie mobile team
The game artist
The programmer
The game tester
Skills of a professional player
University of Gamestop
The game producer
The sound designer
Summary
3
Graphics for Mobile
Graphics for Mobile
Pixels and vectors
The graphic file formats
Software to create game graphics
Resolution issues with mobile games
2D graphic assets
3D graphic assets
Designing a character for mobile
Colors for mobile
The user interface and HUD
Summary
4
Audio for Mobile
Audio for Mobile
Digital sound technology
Types of game sounds
The audio editing software
Designing audio for mobile games
Best practices for mobile games audio design
Summary
5
Coding Games
Coding Games
Main features of programming languages
Game programming
C++
Java
Scripting languages
Structure of a game program
Summary
6
Mobile Game Controls
Mobile Game Controls
Input technology
Touchscreens
Keypads
Touchscreen gestures
Input interfaces for mobile games
Built-in devices
Future technologies
Summary
7
Interface Design for Mobile Games
Interface Design for Mobile Games
The role of the user interface
Approaching user interface design
Designing the UI
Best practices in UI design
Summary
8
Mobile Game Engines
Mobile Game Engines
What engines can do
What engines can't do
Game engines
Unity3D Tutorial – part 1
Summary
9
Prototyping
Prototyping
Steps in the prototyping process
Prototyping styles
Types of prototyping
Why prototype?
What to avoid
Tools
Unity3D tutorial – part 2
Summary
10
Balancing, Tuning, and Polishing Mobile Games
Balancing, Tuning, and Polishing Mobile Games
Balancing
Tuning
Difficulty settings
Unity 3D tutorial – part 3
Summary
11
Mobile Game Design
Mobile Game Design
The basic game design process
The dos and don'ts of game design
Designing mobile games
The mobile market
Mobile gamers
Business models
What makes games fun
Summary
12
Pitching a Mobile Game
Pitching a Mobile Game
The pitch document
Game concept
Game mechanics
Tech
Lilypads pitch document
Character design
Game mechanics
Tech
Summary
Index
Index

Structure of a game program

Regardless of its destination platform or complexity, each game has a basic structure made of three sections: initialization, the game loop, and termination. Let's describe each one of them.

Initialization

The initialization is where you set anything that the game needs to get going, mainly variables. You set the starting position and parameter values of the main character, the number and starting position of enemies, collectibles and bonus, the difficulty settings, activate data sharing, and run connection protocols; the list may be pretty long, you got the idea.

The game loop

The game loop is the heart of the game, the fundamental routine that keeps going as long as the player keeps playing. In this part of the game program, you get the input from the player, compute the consequences of his actions, and draw the results on screen. Then repeat.

The following script represents the basic structure of a game loop:

int main()
{
    bool gameEnded=false;

    while(!gameEnded...
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