Aug 2, 2008

Things NOT to do while developing Flash Lite mobile games

I recently came across this article which bullets down 50 DONT'S in a game. Although this is more from a web gaming perspective, I'd thought I'd narrow it down to a mobile game experience with a few points of my own.


40 Ways to Make Us HATE Your Flash Lite Game

  1. Add loud and annoying sound effects to your game
  2. Don’t add sound control options so we have to listen to your loud and annoying sound effects
  3. Make your game ridiculously hard
  4. Have a confusing menu system
  5. Forget to embed all of your dynamic textfields
  6. Don’t optimize your code
  7. Add a bunch of cool effects that require lots of processing power and slow down the gaming experience
  8. Don’t fix the bugs
  9. Have long animations that we can’t skip
  10. Don’t give us a clear goal to beat the game
  11. Add glow effects to everything
  12. Make confusing controls
  13. Make the instructions all text with no explanatory pictures/diagrams
  14. Make a storyline without graphics to explain it
  15. Make it easy for us to cheat
  16. Create an ugly color scheme
  17. Make the text unreadable
  18. Don’t let the buttons look like buttons, we’ll obviously find them very easily
  19. Don’t fix the typos
  20. Very repetitive game-play
  21. Don’t let us pause the game
  22. Add pointless features that add a lot of file size
  23. Make a really long menu system
  24. Make us have to navigate through the entire menu system after we lose the game
  25. Camouflage the enemies so we can’t see them until we randomly begin losing health or lose the game
  26. Don’t put rollOver functions onto your buttons
  27. Make game-play really slow
  28. Make loss inevitable
  29. Don’t put in a scoring system. We don’t want to know how well we did
  30. Make stupid computer AI
  31. Make the description of the game really short or really obscure
  32. Design a game-play that has been exploited by multiple game designers before
  33. Design graphics that have an uneven quality when seen on a mobile screen
  34. When run on multiple devices, game scales non uniformly showing objects off screen
  35. Don't worry about rectifying text that looks blurred
  36. Advanced levels with really short and easy game-play
  37. Don't let us change game options like sound control and quality during a game-play
  38. A bad copy of a popular game
  39. A cluttered HUD (Heads-Up Display)
  40. Game which are not self explanatory, makes me want to refer to help even after starting playing the game

I would not say that this list is the best checklist while developing games. What a gamer might like or not like in a game is a very subjective choice, but considering the practices adapted by mobile game developers over the years, avoiding the above points seem to get the closest to a great mobile gaming experience.

Mariam

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posted by Mariam Dholkawala @ 11:19:00 AM

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