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
you have the processing speed to take advantage of button simultaneity.
Some game developers, in an effort to use the single button available, use
the single key press, the hold, and the release to determine things such as
momentum in a golf swing, for instance.
These are only a few of the factors, but each poses limitations that play a role in determining
exactly which kinds of games you can build. It’s an interesting time for cell
phone game development, because to many developers who have been around for
awhile, today feels much like the early days in game development when game devices
like the early consoles (Intellivision, Atari 2600) had very limited processing power
and memory to work with.
DESIGN ISSUES FOR CELL PHONES
It’s time to dust off that 1970s material and sit down to review it for a moment. I’m
not kidding. The newer phones have small color screens. Hey, at least we can use
some color. They still have limited processing and memory power. Also, the programming
APIs (Application Programming Interface (API) is a method given by an
operating system or application program that allows a programmer writing a game
to make requests of the operating system or some other application) for developing
on the phones are limited. They do not currently include much of the functionality
game programmers have access to on every other platform, like scaling, image flipping,
and complex mathematical functions.
What does this mean? It means that the kind of games you build cannot be processor-intensive,
cannot be memory hogs, and must be visible on tiny color screens.
Ouch! You must always remember, however, that these are the early days, and these
days will pass. Much more sophisticated gaming applications will be available
shortly. Until then, you need to try to satisfy gamers and create new gamers in the
best way possible given your limitations.
Figures 9-4 and 9-5 demonstrate two sample games built for J2ME-compatible
phones. Figure 9-4 shows a puzzle game built for an I-Mode phone (F503i) for the Asian
wireless market. Figure 9-5 is an example of a platform-style game. This type of game
pushes the phone handset hardware to its limits, since most cell phone handsets require
that an application fit within a 64K–100K file size or impression. Newer models hitting
the market are making slightly more memory available for applications like games.
Even with a slight increase in memory availability, most games we’re familiar with
require processing ability, so building a platform game with satisfying speed performance
on a cell phone handset is no easy task.
Keep in mind that developers of content for cell phones need access to the airwaves
(to the carrier providing service to a phone) to build and update games easily. What if