Games

Some tips on how to make video games for smartphones

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  • December 21, 2011

Smartphones have flooded the market with their phones and their app games for several years. The watershed was the iPhone (Apple), closely followed by Android (Google) and recently by Windows Phone (Microsoft). The first two share 90% of the market. The other existing platforms (RIM, BADA) cannot keep pace with these two giants.
Making a game for smartphones can be hard to those who have never grappled with the mobile environment. Memory management is the wrath of every developer and the abundance of devices (especially for Android) makes it very difficult tests. With good foundations for object-oriented programming (C++ or Java) you can tackle the effort of software development. Experience with Flash or Photoshop, and maybe be able to create animations, are the basis for the graphics. The bare minimum for the team is therefore represented by two people. Without wanting to tackle a project too ambitious, about 250 hours of programming and 100 hours of graphics can give life to interesting projects.
For a good design is necessary to clearly define the target of the game: what kind of player I need to meet? What age group? Man or woman? My game must be played for a few minutes every so often (e.g. casual games tetris-style) or the player must spend hours and hours to overcome increasingly complex levels? The game should be free or paid? The player can make purchases of virtual items in the game? The player will interact with others in a virtual world? It’ll be a ranking system?
Another important aspect is to spread the game worldwide. Thanks to the market of each platform, the game is published simultaneously in dozens of different countries, of course dozens of different languages. A game “localized”, i.e. with a translation into the language of the player, will be more successful than a game expressed only in one language.
Games for mobile platform entirely produced in Italy are few and often offered by small groups of enthusiasts and volunteers, in the jargon called “Italian indie developers”. Zapmobilegames is an interesting reality, born in Naples, with assets currently two games for Android with a following, “Herculaneum” and “Tic Tank Toe,” which also received some praise from magazines.
These games are located in five languages: Italian, English, French, German, Spanish. The following image shows the global spread of Tic Tank Toe a few weeks after publication:

It’s clear that the American market is the master for the Android platform so it is clear that a game that has at least the English translation will have the option to increase its double diffusion.
The opportunity to be present on different platforms (Android and iOS at least) greatly increases the spread of the game and for this reason Zapmobilegames intends to extend its catalog games even on iOS platform to expand its market and become a reference for new and emerging groups of Italians indie developing teams.

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