As mobile phones become more and more sophisticated, our expectations of the games that appear on them are increasing too. But should they be? Are some developers guilty of trying to squeeze too much out of a currently limited platform? We asked Phil Marley, who has designed both mobile phone and console games at Kuju Entertainment, to come up with ten rules for better mobile game design.
If you've ever found yourself getting frustrated with unfriendly controls, rickety level design or poor responsiveness after downloading the latest console to mobile conversion, read on…
Phones aren't built for playing games on The developer's dream of a handset with GameBoy Advance-quality shoulder buttons and a proper D-pad remains just a dream. Most handsets have small, cramped buttons that are awkward to get at. Many don't respond if you press more than one button at once (which means a gameplay staple - the running jump - needs careful thought). Keep the number of controls down, especially in a fast action game.
Players aren't gamers Now that everyone and their dog has a mobile, the chances of your latest title being downloaded by someone who's never played a video game before - on any platform - becomes quite high. Don't assume any knowledge, and include a tutorial level to teach the basics so that the player doesn't have to wade through pages of instructions.
Players get distracted Make pausing easy - and ideally, make it possible to drop out of the game completely and return to pick up where you left off. Mobile gamers have distractions that console gamers don't - reaching their stop on a train, talking to a friend, shuffling past someone on the tube. It's okay to punish players for looking away from the screen, but make sure that they never have to retrace their steps for more than ten or twenty seconds.
Short and fun wins over long and dull No-one expects to get 30 hours of gameplay from a mobile phone game. Given a set budget, it's far better to deliver a high-quality three hour experience than a poor ten hour one. Include secret levels and unlockables for practised gamers who will complete it in an hour - reward them for replaying. Be realistic - players only have a limited amount of space on their phones and games get swapped in and out just as ringtones do - they're disposable. Remember, if a player's only playing for five minutes a day, even two hours of gameplay will last for over three weeks, by which point the player's ready for something new.
The development world has changed When arcade games on a mobile became viable, everyone raided eighties arcade machines for ideas, and we saw tens of different versions of the same few games. We're getting past that now, and we're beginning to see more adventurous concepts akin to SNES and Master System-era games. The higher-end platforms are already pushing towards Doom-era 3D (though with such a small screen size, 2D certainly still has some advantages). We've gone from text-only WAP games to 3D in a scant few years. Simultaneously, the number of developers in the field has shot up. This means that it's easy to get left behind if you don't have both good technology people keeping you at the cutting edge and good marketing people finding you licenses to work with and making sure your games get seen. We're very fortunate to have both at Kuju.
Don't let technology take over It's great to support the latest technology, but past a certain point you begin to limit your market to early adopters. If your latest game is based around technology that's only going to be found in the highest-end business handsets for the next six months (WiFi, anyone?), ask yourself if you're really going to sell many copies.
Plan for lots of versions Lots of different handsets, screen resolutions, music handling capabilities, control layouts, processor speeds. Until there's a standard (something like what Microsoft pushed for with the Multimedia PC long ago) every title launch is going to either have a huge amount of different versions, or limit itself to only the more popular handsets.
Forget the plot Given that you don't typically have space for lots of pre-recorded speech, any plot is going to have to fit within the in-game action and the occasional screen of text. A screen will only hold a few short sentences even on the largest versions, and no-one wants to read more than a few of these before each level. So forget your multi-layered conspiracy theory epic: what you can't write in a handful of paragraphs isn't going to happen. If you can, mix the plot into the in-game action to break things up (in Judge Dredd we had our characters talking in comic book-style speech balloons at key points).
Accept the limitations… Too many mobile games carry across baggage from console versions. In some cases, it's great to have a mobile phone game that looks like a shrunk-down version of its console cousin. But don't include unnecessary screen clutter and complex menu systems just because they look good when you see them on a 28" widescreen TV. Forget loading and saving - make it transparent to drop out of the game and continue it again. Forget profiles that allow different players to save their progress (how often do you lend your mobile phone to someone else, anyway?). Strip everything down to its basics.
…And embrace the advantages Make use of the handset's advantages over a console. Can you use Bluetooth? Offer downloadable content? Let hundreds of players play at the same time? Integrate the phone's camera into the game? In Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure we're using the phone's keypad to simulate the time-travelling phone booth in the film - dial a date and you're taken to that year!
