Designing and developing mobile video games can be very risky and time consuming, but a lot of fun.
Mobile Game Styles and Themes
At tmhr consulting we have been designing and developing mobile games for a number of months now. The game styles including runner shooter, runner, space shooter and themes range from ninja, zombie pirates, space, etc.
Good Mobile Game Design
The Designing and developing of mobile games has been more of a learning experience than we thought it would be. At Tmhr consulting we have a good eye for a good design but it is our design partners who provide our design skills and knowledge. We have been learning more and more about what makes a good mobile design.
So when we started designing mobile games we had to go in with our eyes and more importantly our ears open. We found that we could not solely rely on our designers to create the games assets the way we needed them, but we also felt it was really important for us to give our designers the freedom to apply their creative skills.
There are things that we found were consistently issues with the designed assets:
- Many designers are good at the design aspect but not all.
- Characters and obstacle animation.
- Backgrounds and background layers.
- Game Icon design.
- User interface design.
- Buttons
- Text
- UI match with game theme.
Some of the issues we have had to deal with are:
- Assets not being consistent with orientation.
- Portrait
- Landscape
- Assets sizes for different devices and types.
- Directions of characters and obstacles.
- Left to right vs right to left.
- Quality of the graphics themselves.
- buttons
- Text
- Images
- Character and Obstacle issues.
- Size mismatches.
- Direction mismatches.
- Style mismatches (real vs cartoon, etc.)
- Position of game ads vs buttons and counters.
- Terrible User Interface
- Bad Store Design
We would not consider ourselves specialists in any of these fields. We rely on our partners to help us get all this stuff right. Sometimes we just have to provide simple nudges here and there or suggestions that this object might look better if you made hat change, etc.
Maintain Control over Game Concept
One thing we did learn really early was that we had to create and maintain the control over the overall game style, theme and storyboard of the mobile games. That does mean that we could not get great ideas from our designers and developers, but we do have to create the initial game ideas and share those with our designers and developers.
Social MMO Game
The other interesting type of game we are working on is a MMO war social game. We are working at getting the server and client versions up and running and then we will work on getting them talking together.
Once we have that accomplished we will start the process of designing the content.
Come back for our next blog and we will expand more on our social game efforts.
