Three Issues with Mobile Gaming

I do not hate mobile games as much as I might let people think I do. Something that's probably obvious for people reading this blog. The reason I avoid mobile gaming so vehemently has to do with the issues that come with it.

Heat Generation

Really nice in the winter, very worry some in the summer. Our current generation of smartphones does not support any cooling mechanisms. Usually, this is not a problem for most applications. For games, however - oh boy. I've seen plenty of games that heat my mobile phone up to +40° celsius / +104° Fahrenheit and that got me quite worried. So much that I have an app that warns me once I reach those numbers. I did a quick search online to determine the lowest value that is unhealthy for my mobile phone and went with that.

Battery Life

I never have to worry about this on my tower PC at home. 

This one doesn't have batteries aside from those that are used to save BIOS or UEFI data like what time it is. (Yes, I had an empty button battery once and it reset the time to the 1st of January 1970 and 0:00am I think?) So, no reason to care about such a thing for desktop games. However, when developing games for smartphones, tablets, and laptops people are not gonna be happy with a game that literally sucks their power out of their mobile phone like a vampire. You play for what feels like 5 minutes and your battery already dropped by 20%. Extremely scary. Especially if you're a long time from a nearby power supply. Of course, you could argue that people can use those compact power cell battery thingies... but do you really want your user to run around with a bag full of battery packs? I hope not.

User Input

This is like one of the more known issues that I've already mentioned but here we go again. For most people, the only input they have on their mobile devices are six buttons and a touch screen. Many of these buttons contain system features such as going back, lower/higher volume, switch off, show other processes and go to the desktop. This means we're pretty limited if we don't want to or can't overwrite these functionalities. Additionally, not every device features multi-touch. That means some devices can only work with up to two touches at the same time. So, if our game needs three inputs our game is nearly unplayable. Another issue that rises from touch input is the limited view from the hands obstructing the view.

Design Goals

So, all these issues need to be considered when designing games for mobile devices. We need to optimize the performance to reduce unnecessary heat. Examples here would be less code in the update loop and working with events like concepts (only call when necessary), reduce graphic effects and/or frames per second and lastly reducing the quality of the graphics.

Same about the battery life. Interestingly using a lot of light colors takes more power for the display than darker colors costing more battery life.

Make sure to design your game that it either is not necessary to stay up to date with the screen or have the input somewhere outside where coverage doesn't matter much or even better at all. A good way would be to implement controls inside of the HUD or menu. Non-action or round-based games don't have as much of a coverage issue. Another thing is to make sure your game can be played with at least two touch inputs at the same moment.

A good option is to also give the user the ability to change the settings to decide if they want more quality at the respective cost or not. I don't care about battery power if I'm at home, I can just charge the phone! Or put some ice on it in the hope of cooling it. Into the freezer, here we go!

At least until we get a new generation of mobile devices that attempts to fix these issues.

Combining Mobile and PC Games

More and more companies are switching to mobile game development as more and more companies show that that's where you can make the most income. I do mobile game development myself, for different reasons, but something I have yet to see is a mobile game that is connected to a computer game.

Broad Idea

This is a pretty broad idea and you can or could make literally anything. Thus I'm gonna brainstorm some ideas that I'll mention or talk about. There are some important aspects that we should discuss and consider before though.

PC, Mobile, and Combinational Weaknesses

First of all, combing mobile and computer games we need to know the weaknesses of the coupling as well as each of them themselves. Mobile devices have restricted input, using virtual buttons makes it tedious to control them, the view on the screen can, could or is blocked by the user input when using touch. Phone batteries are still limited, many phones in the current generation do not provide cooling.  They can be carried easily in the baggy trousers for example. On the computer side, we have limited transportation. You could use a laptop but that also requires a backpack, laptop bag or some other way to transport that chungus. Coupling them pretty much fixes some issues up above but only to a certain degree. We can now move around playing the game somewhat but we're limited by the phone's hardware. Also, the usage of the phone at home while playing the game on the computer can be annoying or intrusive. So, I'd say that's discouraged. Could make an interesting mechanic in games where you have to multitask between devices though.

The Untapped Potential

The basic idea of many game developers is to get the player to think about the game in their spare time or free time. Thinking about new strategies to come up to try out or solving other problems for example. Using a mobile device you can make an app that is connected with your game to have something for the player while they can't play the main game. This could be mini-games, gamified tasks that give in-game rewards or provide community and theorycrafting features and the biggest thing about this is, that I haven't found one game that implemented this. It doesn't mean it doesn't exist but, hey. Be the first to get it out there.

Examples

One example would be to use the way Pokemon GO! was implemented to make a similar game for resource gathering. Allowing you to gain resources for the main game at the cost of your in-game currency. This gives the player an alternative to do sport, or collect resources while traveling for example.

Another option would be to share and allow communication with the guild chat via an app.

This way people can communicate with each other through your app. This doesn't require the player to download Teamspeak or Discord for their mobile phone or to create a WhatsApp group. Additionally, it's possible to implement unique game information into it that would not be possible to be provided by other apps.

This one pretty much shows that you can make literally anything. Your only limitation is the

imagination... and well... user experience design. Anyways you could also make an app that gives you puzzles for chests or areas that are locked off and you need to open them via a puzzle on your mobile phone for example. You could even implement a wait time, that way you can collect these in-game and then when you're most likely outside the game you can do them in the mean-time.

Conclusion

The basic idea is quite simple here. Make a mobile app that keeps your users busy while not at home being able to play the game. I mean, this is not the most interesting thing for mobile development. It does, however, avoid all the issues that mobile-only game development has for big games. Another post I should address...