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

Types of prototyping


There are two basic types of coding used in prototyping: disposable and reusable. With the first type, the goal is to get a proof-of-concept out as quickly as possible with no concern for reusability. With the second type the plan is code created for the prototype will to some degree be used in the final app.

Disposable code

Disposable code is just what it sounds like; it is meant to be tossed out after the prototyping process is complete. This type of prototyping is also called throwaway or rapid prototyping.

Disposable coding is an effective way to test out untried concepts early in the design process. Some good ideas just don't work out as planned and finding this out quickly is an important use of the prototyping process.

Mobile game development is heavily reliant on an efficient and robust development cycle. Keeping costs to a minimum can mean the difference between success and failure of a project. The ability to determine from the start of the project that a core...