PopCap, the company behind social gaming hits as Plants vs. Zombies and Bejeweled, has a way of doing presentations at conferences. Last year’s Social Gaming Summit presentation was insightful in the sense that developers were advised to postpone trying to make money from their game until there is some serious traction.At yesterday’s London Games Conference, PopCap’s presentation was equally remarkable. During a brief presentation David Bishop (Senior Game Designer) presented the mobile development community with 10 rules that would ensure commercial failure in mobile game...

Last night a good friend of mine showed me the latest Need for Speed game on the iphone / ipad. Quite an impressive feat of rendering and a relatively good game to boot. However, the front end, wow, a classic case in UI mis-engineering. Loads of stats, pages and pages of bits and pieces to wade through – a classic case of over stimulating the player with lots of decisions they have no business making – stuff that will significantly change their game play experience but being made at a time when the user often has no experience of what changes actually mean.It got me thinking abou...

Matt Small, creative director at independent developer Vector Unit, thought his small studio would focus on consoles forever when it was working on Hydro Thunder Hurricane for Xbox Live Arcade.But then the smartphone and tablet market picked up, and mobile devices started to offer increasing amounts of processing power. That increase in power opened up new opportunities for the people at Vector Unit, which had years of developing for consoles.So the studio worked with Tegra chipmaker Nvidia and created the Android and iOS game Riptide GT, a jet ski racing game that took five months to develop....

IntroductionHi, I’m Glenn Fiedler and welcome to the first article in my online book Networking for Game ProgrammersIn this article we start with the most basic aspect of network programming, sending and receiving data over the network. This is just the beginning – the simplest and most basic part of what network programmers do, but still it is quite intricate and non-obvious as to what the best course of action is. Take care because if you get this part wrong it will have terrible effects on your multiplayer game!You have most likely heard of sockets, and are probably aware that...

I recently released my first game, X Fleet, available now in Android Market. It’s a fast paced space shooter / rpg riddled with awesomeness and you should get it now.The reason you should avoid hierarchies/inheritance is your objects will be far too varied and complicated in form to be accurately represented as such. More on this below. The alternative is a component model. This is very basic. Instead of having everything inheriting (e.g. Object -> MovableObject -> AnimatedMovableObject), have your GameObjects include a list of GameComponents, and delegate behaviour from the ...

This weekend I started work on my first full blown game for the iPhone. I’m not ready to share the details of what the game will be specifically as I’m sure these will change dramatically over the coming weeks. All I’m sure on is it will be a platform game built with Corona SDK.To get me started I’ve been downloading a bunch of games from the app store, jotting down some of the areas contributing to their addictiveness and success.Short levelsI do most of my game playing in short burst. This may be during a short train journey into town, or a few minutes while my di...