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
comparison, evolution, and refinement, wireless game feedback from players will
continue to challenge game designers to respond quickly in providing content to
match the wishes and desires of the players. What an opportunity to take gaming past
everyone’s wildest speculations!
The best games on wireless probably won’t come first. This is no surprise. The best
games on any new platform tend to be the second- or third-generation games. Developers
are always learning feverishly how to do more with less, and how to erode every
limit. Some industry commentators don’t even seem to believe that wireless can or
will deliver at all. On this score, only patience and time will tell.
Personally, I believe that every opportunity to build game content should be pursued
to the fullest. Let’s not back down or give up on wireless simply because of weak
processors and small, nonstandardized screen sizes. Patience is required.
In my mind, every opportunity to grow new gaming venues needs to be explored
fully in order to bring much needed new blood and the attendant new forms of content
inspiration into a sometimes stagnant industry—despite the constant challenges.
If we continue to make games in three genres for a “handful of hard-cores” on two
platforms, we will never grow as an industry or as developers, and opportunity for
everyone will diminish in kind.
CASE STUDY COMMENTS ON
DEVELOPMENT FACTORS IN
THE INFANCY OF WIRELESS
“Infancy” almost implies too much maturity when it comes to mobile game development.
Right now, it’s a crazy world out there in wireless game development. If you’ve
looked around at many of the available games, I’m sure you’ve seen games built for
cell phones and delivered by a wireless carrier that barely perform at all.
As mentioned earlier, international development on any game title is difficult due
to region-based carrier access for any given handset. You might find yourself working
on a handset from another country with no way to test your game or download
successive game builds into it. To test your game, you need to ship the handset back
to the country in which wireless service is available for it, and then have someone
download and test your game on the handset. As you can see, this is far from an optimal
development process, and is a reason why developers located within the region
where the game ultimately is to be deployed continue to get the important work contracts
for their geographic areas.
It would seem logical for phone handset manufacturers to offer a docking device
for application development on their handsets that would enable developers to transfer
application information to phones that are out of their service area, but I haven’t