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

Touchscreen gestures


Touchscreen smartphones allow a variety of operations to be performed by users, both single and multitouch. Multitouch gestures refer to touchscreen input that uses two or more fingers at a time. The following is a list of the most common touch-based operations available with Apple, Android, and Windows Phone devices.

Single–tap

Touch the screen with one finger, once. This is the fundamental operation required to type text messages and notes, and to launch applications.

Double–tap

Tap the screen twice, with one finger. This is usually done to select a piece of text to edit it.

Long press

Press the screen with one finger, and hold. This operation is generally used to select and move icons around the screen.

Scroll

Touch the scroll with a single finger, and move it up and down, or left and right. You do this when, for example, you need to find a contact in your list.

Spread and pinch

To "spread" means to touch the screen with thumb and forefinger and move the fingers apart, an...