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Home > Game Development > Mobile Game Development > Mobile Game Design Essentials
Mobile Game Design Essentials
Mobile Game Design Essentials

Mobile Game Design Essentials: Immerse yourself in the fundamentals of mobile game design. This book is written by two highly experienced industry professionals to give real insights and valuable advice on creating games for this lucrative market.

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Mobile Game Design Essentials

Chapter 2. The Mobile Indie Team

Assembling a good team with the right people is the first step towards the production of a well-done title. The process of videogame development is a pretty tough one and it requires talent, skill, patience, and an iron will.

This is especially true for an indie team, because as a team of people who usually don't work under the constraints of a solid company, they can easily break up during the development process for the most unexpected reasons!

When choosing the members of your mobile team, you'd better look for people who have both talent and the ability to effectively cooperate with other people to create the perfect title, in order to trigger your career in the gaming industry.

The following chapter provides a detailed description of the key roles to cover in a mobile indie team, the tasks they are responsible for, the skills they need, and the academic courses that can help them get those skills.

In this chapter, we will cover:

  • A presentation...

A matter of size

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...

Key roles in a successful team

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...

What it takes

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.

Commitment

In videogame development, (almost) any element of the game needs to be created from scratch. Every pixel requires someone to draw it, any action performed by a character needs someone to animate it, any event needs to be coded, any sound effect must be composed, and the list is long. It is not by chance that the inclusion of digital contents in movies led to a large increase in cost.

Cohesion

Any activity that is shared among different people requires the group to hold together on the common goal, especially in a small group where each person is responsible for a key element of the project.

To develop a game requires weeks, or months, more reasonably. During this period, any...

The roles in an indie mobile team

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 designer

The game designer defines what happens in a game and what the player does to progress through it. He is responsible for turning a game play idea into a detailed design document, which is constantly updated and used by all other team members as a reference guide to develop their part of the project.

During the pre-production phase of a game, the designer is responsible for defining what the game is about, its story and the game world...

The game artist

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...

The programmer

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...

A matter of size

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...

Key roles in a successful team

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...

What it takes

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.

Commitment

In videogame development, (almost) any element of the game needs to be created from scratch. Every pixel requires someone to draw it, any action performed by a character needs someone to animate it, any event needs to be coded, any sound effect must be composed, and the list is long. It is not by chance that the inclusion of digital contents in movies led to a large increase in cost.

Cohesion

Any activity that is shared among different people requires the group to hold together on the common goal, especially in a small group where each person is responsible for a key element of the project.

To develop a game requires weeks, or months, more reasonably. During this period, any...

The roles in an indie mobile team

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 designer

The game designer defines what happens in a game and what the player does to progress through it. He is responsible for turning a game play idea into a detailed design document, which is constantly updated and used by all other team members as a reference guide to develop their part of the project.

During the pre-production phase of a game, the designer is responsible for defining what the game is about, its story and the game world, what the...

The game artist

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...

The programmer

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...

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Key benefits

  • Packed with the best practices in game development, and the methodologies and tricks to create fun, polished games
  • Detailed descriptions of software and methodologies to create graphics and audio for video games
  • References to the most popular programming and scripting languages and development kits

Description

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.

Who is this book for?

This book is for game enthusiasts who want to try their hand at designing, developing, and publishing their own games. Be aware that this effort requires a wide variety of skills, including graphic and audio design, programming, and play testing, which is why we also describe how to assemble a team with the appropriate skills. On the other hand if you just want to prototype your game ideas to see how they “play out”, this book will meet your needs as well.

What you will learn

  • Get to know who makes up a game development team and how to select the right people for yours
  • Discover the most popular graphics software applications as well as understand the guidelines to produce graphics efficiently
  • Explore the most popular audio software applications and how to produce sound effects and music for your games
  • Get well versed with the programming languages used in mobile game development
  • Learn what the most common input systems and controls used in mobile games are
  • Understand what the most popular game engines used in mobile game development are and which are appropriate to your game s characteristics
  • Get acquainted with the game development process from concept to release
  • Learn how to publish and market your mobile game
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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Nov 21, 2013
Length: 358 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781849692984
Category :
Game Development
Concepts :
Mobile Game Development

What do you get with Print?

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Product feature icon Paperback book shipped to your preferred address
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Product feature icon DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want
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Estimated delivery fee Deliver to United States

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Product Details

Publication date : Nov 21, 2013
Length: 358 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781849692984
Category :
Game Development
Concepts :
Mobile Game Development

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Table of Contents

13 Chapters
1. Operating Systems – Mobile and Otherwise Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
1. Operating Systems – Mobile and Otherwise
Operating systems
Mobile operating systems
Summary
2. The Mobile Indie Team Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. 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 Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. 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 Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. 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 Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Coding Games
Main features of programming languages
Game programming
C++
Java
Scripting languages
Structure of a game program
Summary
6. Mobile Game Controls Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. 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 Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. 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 Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Mobile Game Engines
What engines can do
What engines can't do
Game engines
Unity3D Tutorial – part 1
Summary
9. Prototyping Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. 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 Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
10. Balancing, Tuning, and Polishing Mobile Games
Balancing
Tuning
Difficulty settings
Unity 3D tutorial – part 3
Summary
11. Mobile Game Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
11. 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 Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
12. Pitching a Mobile Game
The pitch document
Game concept
Game mechanics
Tech
Lilypads pitch document
Character design
Game mechanics
Tech
Summary
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index

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Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
(3 Ratings)
5 star 100%
4 star 0%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%
Martin Feb 05, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I can highly recommend this book to beginners and people who would like to start making games and just don't know where to start. It is a consice introduction to mobile game industry that explains all the basic terms and essential concepts. It will serve well even to experienced game programmers who feel their games were missing something.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Christiano Rezende Mar 03, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I'm almost finished reading this book.First things first. Be aware that this is not a step-by-step, tutorial-like book on how to develop a mobile game. It indeed includes a complete project on how to design a mobile game using Unity. But that is not the main focus of the book. This is an ESSENTIALS book that comprehensively discusses the most popular platforms and technologies used to design mobile games.The first chapters deal with the theory behind mobile games, while discussing the most popular platforms and the technology behind each one of them, as well as how to assemble an effective team of game developers. The book then steps into graphics and sound design, while it explains the common software and workflow used by artists to create compelling 2D/3D graphics, music and effects for mobile games. Moving forward, the book steps into game scripting, describing the most suitable scripting languages as well as programming languages for mobile game development. From then, the book discusses the most popular game engines used to rapidly prototype and develop mobile games. The last chapters deal with balancing, optimizing, polishing, marketing and selling mobile games.The author surely knows what he is talking about, and thoroughly manages to put his knowledge in a clear and concise way. Just bear in mind that this is a theoretical approach on mobile games, not a practical how-to tutorial.All in all, this is an easily recommended book for anyone seeking information about the ins and outs of mobile game design.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
EulogioEP Mar 31, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
El temario abarca todos los aspectos del diseño, desde tamaño de pantallas, usabilidad, etc hasta sonidos y diferentes engines para trabajar. Lo recomiendo para todos aquellos que quieran iniciarse en el mundo del diseño de videojuegos para plataformas móviles.
Amazon Verified review Amazon

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Hands-On Unity 2022 Game Development
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Godot 4 Game Development Projects
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Aug 2023 264 pages
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Taking Blender to the Next Level
Taking Blender to the Next Level
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Shipping Details

USA:

'

Economy: Delivery to most addresses in the US within 10-15 business days

Premium: Trackable Delivery to most addresses in the US within 3-8 business days

UK:

Economy: Delivery to most addresses in the U.K. within 7-9 business days.
Shipments are not trackable

Premium: Trackable delivery to most addresses in the U.K. within 3-4 business days!
Add one extra business day for deliveries to Northern Ireland and Scottish Highlands and islands

EU:

Premium: Trackable delivery to most EU destinations within 4-9 business days.

Australia:

Economy: Can deliver to P. O. Boxes and private residences.
Trackable service with delivery to addresses in Australia only.
Delivery time ranges from 7-9 business days for VIC and 8-10 business days for Interstate metro
Delivery time is up to 15 business days for remote areas of WA, NT & QLD.

Premium: Delivery to addresses in Australia only
Trackable delivery to most P. O. Boxes and private residences in Australia within 4-5 days based on the distance to a destination following dispatch.

India:

Premium: Delivery to most Indian addresses within 5-6 business days

Rest of the World:

Premium: Countries in the American continent: Trackable delivery to most countries within 4-7 business days

Asia:

Premium: Delivery to most Asian addresses within 5-9 business days

Disclaimer:
All orders received before 5 PM U.K time would start printing from the next business day. So the estimated delivery times start from the next day as well. Orders received after 5 PM U.K time (in our internal systems) on a business day or anytime on the weekend will begin printing the second to next business day. For example, an order placed at 11 AM today will begin printing tomorrow, whereas an order placed at 9 PM tonight will begin printing the day after tomorrow.


Unfortunately, due to several restrictions, we are unable to ship to the following countries:

  1. Afghanistan
  2. American Samoa
  3. Belarus
  4. Brunei Darussalam
  5. Central African Republic
  6. The Democratic Republic of Congo
  7. Eritrea
  8. Guinea-bissau
  9. Iran
  10. Lebanon
  11. Libiya Arab Jamahriya
  12. Somalia
  13. Sudan
  14. Russian Federation
  15. Syrian Arab Republic
  16. Ukraine
  17. Venezuela