One of the most interesting aspects of mobile game development is that it offers opportunities to small teams to effectively get into the competition. From a certain perspective, mobile game development recalls the age of early computer games, when a team of few members shipped games that could gain worldwide popularity. Electronic Arts got their start by publishing indie developers' products.

Generally speaking, mobile games tend to have a limited scope when compared to common high budget/high quality (AAA) console or PC titles. Mobile games are designed to be played in small chunks and rely on simple game mechanics that require fewer assets, less programming, and shorter testing and debug time. This means that mobile games require less people for development and can be developed by teams of one or few individuals for every key role.

A good reason to keep the mobile dev team small has very much to do with the progress. Working progress can slow down either if the team is...

Though it is very important that each member has a well-defined role, when dealing with small teams it is likely that one member will have multiple roles and that those roles are shared between more than one member.

This is one reason why small teams usually offer better career opportunities to those who can cover several roles. Working in a small team, where people are required to work on different aspects of the game at the same time, they have the opportunity to show their different talents and thus to advance their careers. It is also a good opportunity to learn new skills and expand their overall expertise.

Generally speaking, the key roles that need to be covered in a mobile dev team are: Design, Art\Modeling, Programming, Sound, QA\Testing, and Production. These are all key aspects of a game development and each of these roles will be explored in the following sections of this chapter.

The following figure represents the average subdivision of total cost...

Game development is a lot of work! There is a huge amount of things to do even to make simple games. Before we delve into the details of each role in a team, it is worth saying something about the cross competencies that each individual should have for that team to be effective and reach its goals.

What follows here is a review of the main roles required for an ideal mobile indie team. For each role, we provide a description of duties, skills, personal traits, and the academic formation.

We don't mean that this list of roles is a requirement for any team; it is possible for people getting into the game industry to have different backgrounds.

Also, we don't mean that each role represents a person. There can be people covering more than one role, as it is likely that more people will share one role.

The game artist is responsible for creating in-game art: characters, animations, game objects, backgrounds, environments, and game interface.

No need to say, artwork is very important in a videogame! Graphics are the most prominent characteristic of a videogame and they are also important from a marketing point of view. Most of the time, customers are attracted to a title by its visual characteristics. When judging a game from its preview, if gameplay is unavailable, the game is judged solely on its visual appeal.

In the early days of computer videogames, a single artist could cover all the graphic needs of a game. As time passed, it required more people to be involved in the creation of the graphics for a title, and this lead to the creation of groups of artists as part of the development team.

In a mobile team it is very likely that graphics will be made by two to three people with a separation of duties, such as one artist on 2D graphics (concept, sprites, game interface...

Programming, and videogame programming in particular, can be pretty similar to performing magic, in some ways.

It has to do with crafting formulas learned from books, a knowledge hard to grasp and to understand, that allows those who are initiated to make anything they wish happen on a computer or other device screen!

Out of the fantasy metaphor, the programmer is the guy who takes care of coding things that happen in a videogame, the one who turns the math and logic behind it into commands and functions and he is probably the most important professional in a videogame team. You can have the most appealing design in the world, the best graphics and sounds, but without someone coding this stuff, your game simply won't exist!

In the early days of videogames, when games were nothing more than geometry performing on the screen, the programmer was the team, as he took care of design and artwork too.

As the complexity of games increased, programmers began to focus on just coding. Over...