4. Mobile

Flash: Until today I would have said that, iOS aside, mobile support for the Flash plugin was great But Adobe have officially killed the Flash Player plugin for mobile and tablets, so consider this utterly dead. You can create mobile apps via AIR, but they aren’t web games so are outside the scope of this article. [Update] Stage3D for mobile still isn’t there yet and with so many hardware/vendor combinations, and an ageing AVM behind it, it’s an uphill battle for Adobe devs. Also it appears that in the restructuring Adobe have removed Oliver Goldman from the AIR team and moved him to Cloud projects. He was an absolutely key figure in AIR, there from the start, so read into this what you will.

HTML5: Here mobile support goes from strength to strength. iOS5 saw a huge HTML5 performance increase. As mobile browsers start allowing access to features  such as touch events and accelerometer support, I only see this getting better. Of course you still have to deal with all the different screen resolutions and aspect ratios, but this isn’t specific to HTML5.

Unity: There is no mobile browser Unity plugin. Given Unity’s strength at compiling native mobile apps I can understand why.

Richard Davey shares his insights and experiences creating games on Flash, HTML5, and Unity across 10 different axis. In the light of Flash's probable demise his advice is: stick with Flash while you can, but start learning JavaScript and HTML5 too. It's a backward step but one you'd better prepare for.

UDK, id Tech 3, and Unity are all vastly different tools.

With UDK, you have script-level access, not native. As such, you are somewhat limited in the modifications you can perform. Additionally, UnrealScript is extremely slow; as such, it's difficult to optimize any product you do end up creating.

Overall, it's not very well crafted for anything that drastically doesn't match Epic's product line.

id Tech 3 will give you C++ access. That being said, it's much older technology, the tools aren't as robust, etc. Personally, I've never used it; but, it's not something you're going to build a commercial product with (unless you're looking for something scaled back. Check out this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id%5FTech%5F3#Projects%5Fbased%5Fon%5Fthe%5FGPL%5Fsource%5Frelease).

As for Unity? It's a great place for a beginner/someone that doesn't want to have to delve into the complex details of an engine. Additionally, it's more flexible.

Can you release a triple-A title on it? No. That being said, you're not going to be using it for that.

With the ultimate goal of educating yourself without having to dive into C++, I'd highly recommend Unity.

Summary:

- UDK if you're going to build a game quite similar to Epic's product line. Doesn't give you much freedom.
- id Tech: old, gives you C++ access to flexible, super robust.
- Unity: easy, fast to work with, flexible. But not fancy enough for the AAA title that you're not building anyway.

What we did -- step-by-step how-to for making our iPad game trailer

Technical pointers and specifics are in the next section -- skip ahead if you're not interested in the video production bits. If you are interested in the video production stuff, I'd encourage to read both -- there are useful (but non-specific) production pointers in the technical section.

1. Selected the background music we wanted to use -- we had an awesome original score to choose from. Two tracks stood out as obvious candidates.
2. Looked for appropriate 60-second-ish sections from the above tracks and selected one -- it was 63 seconds and had an appropriate open, close and riffy bits. From this point on everything was played back and tested against this music.
3. Decided on how many non-video (text stills) there would be -- we are using these are breaks in the action. We decided on two (plus the closing stills).
4. Picked our transitions (we did this by testing them against some sample captured video -- when using built-in fixed transitions they can look very different on different source material).

36peas shares a detailed tutorial on creating game trailers. Covers what works in a trailer, how to plan it, and a detailed step-by-step guide to making one. Fantastic!

Indie Games Channel: One of the goals of events like IndieCade and IGF are to expose new indie games to a new audience. In your experience, what is the best way to market and create awareness for indie games?

Ricky Haggett: It takes a lot of time to build awareness for anything these days – there’s so much stuff out there! And this is especially true if you’re trying to do something that hasn’t been done before, and you don’t have a huge marketing budget. I think for a game like Hohokum, it makes sense to start showing and talking about something as soon as there’s something you’re happy with people seeing.

Of course, this has downsides too – we’ve definitely seen that people are excited about our game to the point where they’re actually frustrated about not knowing when they’ll be able to play it for real. But especially when you factor in the benefits of being to watch people play early versions of your game at events like IndieCade or IGF, the net result of announcing early is positive.

Below I've embedded an example that uses this class as a dynamic thumbstick that should work in most browsers. The thumb stick does not appear until input begins and controls the velocity of the green circle:

Using the same class, I've embedded another example, this time as a static thumbstick. This demo also controls the velocity of the green circle but it's been augumented with base and pivot graphics (the same graphics used in Onslaught!):

This code is open source, available on our GitHub demos page. For readers who would also like to see how this is accomplished on an actual iPad, load up this page on your device.

Source code and explanation for creating HTML5 thumb sticks for iPad touch screens. Cool stuff.

Want to create HTML5 mobile games? Vote for this book and we might publish it for you: http://goo.gl/mod/8oS1

It includes mobile video ads, Android-focused engagement campaigns, and the ability to offer interactive advertising such as surveys and trials from renowned brands that are optimised for a mobile interface, and in some cases, mobile-only.

Devs get money when users interact with an ad even if the interaction doesn't mean clicking through to a web site and leaving your game. Nice.

See http://www.sponsorpay.com/.>

So here it is! Let's jump right in by walking through game.js. You can also play the game right here.

1. Create the canvas

// Create the canvas
var canvas = document.createElement("canvas");
var ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
canvas.width = 512;
canvas.height = 480;
document.body.appendChild(canvas);

The first thing we need to do is create a canvas element. I did this in JavaScript instead of HTML to demonstrate how easily it is accomplished. Once we have the element we get a reference to its context, set its dimensions and append it to the document's body.

From the creator of HTML5 game Onslaught! Arena comes this fun step-by-step tutorial where you build an HTML5 game from scratch. Have fun!

Don't forget Packt's HTML5 Games Beginner's Guide too: http://goo.gl/tRMg1

7. Zombies Must Die playing cards
Lots more could be done with it, but still they are quite clever.

A paper game featuring your game's IP is a pretty cool idea for a give away, right?

The figures, which come from thirdparty tracking site WindowsPhoneappList rather than Microsoft itself, show that 17 percent of all the apps on the platform are games - around 5,000.

Almost half – 47 percent – of the apps are free, with 20 percent sporting the marketplace's free trial option.

That's about one sixth of Windows Phone's total catalogue of over 30,000 apps.

Hitting 30,000 in 10 months means Windows Phone Marketplace has been growing about twice as fast as the Android market.