Chapter 10. Targeting Mobile Platforms

The mobile game market is growing dramatically. Although data does vary depending on the sources of information, the general consensus from analysts is that the mobile game market generated in the region of US $10 billion in revenue in 2012, and it is expected to be around double that amount by the end of 2016.

In the past, developing for mobile platforms, such as smartphones and tablet devices, required very specialist skills (each mobile platform has its own SDK (software development kit)), and special tools were required to create applications for each target platform. For example, developing for Apple's iOS operating system for iPad and iPhone required the developer to learn Objective-C (a unique variant of the popular C programming language), and Google's Android platform required different tools and another programming language called Java.

As a result of this mobile-platform diversification, developing games for mobile devices was more expensive...