Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Building Game Worlds
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U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N
phones playing games with fast transfer speeds without a solid wireless infrastructure.
I’m certainly no expert in this area, but it seems that Asia leads the way, followed by
Europe, and then the United States. This is a high-growth area everywhere.
NTT DoCoMo (www.nttdocomo.com) is Japan’s leading carrier, providing a
wide range of wireless services and applications to the public. In Europe, Orange
(www.orange.com) and Vodafone (www.vodafone.com), among others, compete to
provide the same kinds of services. It is no secret that both Asia and Europe have
made serious financial investments in establishing their wireless networks, and that
although the United States has made much progress as of late, it has been lagging.
The pure global phenomenon and reach of each of these carriers is a very exciting
development for anyone involved in providing game content. These carriers obviously
reach vast numbers of subscribers, who become potential players when presented
with the right kind of game content in the right manner, on hardware that offers
reasonable performance.
Development Considerations
It becomes maddening trying to keep up with each new cell phone handset and its
particular hardware specifications, while also watching out for hybrid devices like
the Nokia N-Gage. Just like in game development for other platforms, game developers
want to build games that will run on game platforms that are widely and commonly
available. This factor, among other reasons, is why so many game developers focus
on development for the PlayStation 2—there are many millions of these game machines
in homes around the world.
I’m going to focus on J2ME-based game content developed for the various cell
phones, although there are similarities in approach if you’re developing a BREWbased
game or a game for the N-Gage. Let’s take a quick look at some of the relevant
development considerations:
� Limited processing power in phone handsets Currently, many of the J2MEcompliant
cell phone handsets offer very limited processing power. The phone
hardware simply is not capable of handling complex processor tasks, and
this fact alone places drastic limits on the type of games a developer can build.
The processors inside the phones have gotten more powerful with each
successive phone release, but they still fall far short of being able to handle
very complicated gaming applications.
� Limited physical screen sizes Cell phone handsets all have tiny view screens.
The view screens have gotten larger over time, but they are still very small.
Even worse for developers, there are no “standard” screen sizes, so the
physical screen size for your game application depends on exactly which
model of phone you are developing for. This can lead to portability issues