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

Flash Lite Headers Euro 2008 Game on PocketGamer

Flash Lite Headers Euro 2008 game got a great mention on PocketGamer by Stuart Dredge.

"It's a simple yet addictive game where you choose a team, and then play one-on-one matches of header tennis, where you have to position your player in the right place to bop the ball into your opponent's goal.

The characters look very nice, and it's the kind of game we always imagined Flash Lite would be good for delivering - topical, pick-up-and-play fun."

Read the complete article here

Mariam

Root for your favorite Team at the Euro 2008. Play this Flash mobile game and make them win!

While the world sits and watches the semi finals between Russia and Spain, I blog about a sport which I have only recently started watching. Soccer was never one of my favorite sports...infact living in India I only witnessed an dizzying cricket furore and concluded that the world consisted of no other sport (ok..now that was a little exaggerated :)), until recently when I got to watch a soccer match prior to the Euro 2008. And I did get hooked to the game!

Now as the final Euro match closes on Sunday, I launched a soccer game called Headers Euro 2008 for the Flash Lite gaming community. This game is developed in Flash Lite 1.1 and is currently available on the Playyoo System for all the supported handsets.

The game has a simple game play where you as the player, selects your team and heads the ball into your opponents net to score a goal. As you progress through the initial rounds, you will play against teams of your own group. For the final 3 rounds you play with teams across groups. The opponent keeps getting smarter as you progress through the rounds.

So if you think your favorite team did not qualify for the finals...grab a mobile, play the Headers Game as your favorite team and win through all your opponents!