MochiLand: Tips and Tricks When Developing Your Flash Game on Android

MochiLand: Tips and Tricks When Developing Your Flash Game on Android:

This is a collection of thoughts and tips when developing Flash games targeted to a mobile, more specifically to Android using Adobe’s AIR . I write these notes with a specific focus on full screen games. I’ll cover a few things to think about when designing your game, and a then a few tips and tricks to keep in mind that will [hopefully] save you finding out the hard way.

Planning for Mobile

Before you start making a game for mobile there are some important things to consider, which will save a lot of time and stress if you plan for them.

Type of Gameplay

The type of games typically played are very short bursts of gameplay – while traveling, sitting on the toilet, watching TV. Gameplay that can be stopped and started very quickly. Short bursts of gameplay are very typical of the mobile platform and your games should be made to work with this.

A couple of your options are:

• make your games levels short and sweet, saving the players progress as they complete stages

• make the game save it’s state so that it can be stopped quickly and continued at a later time very easily

• make a game that is only about the score from a single session of play, save that score as soon as it’s achieved

I recommend you keep your games very simple (though still fun) at first, until you get the hang of publishing for this platform and finding out it’s pitfalls. It’s better to get content out there and learn from your mistakes than embark on a huge project and make costly mistakes.

Controls

With mobile phones mostly having touch screens, and a few phones having very small keyboards it’s important to make your game very easy and simple to control. Typically there is no mouse, no arrow keys (or space bar) and screen sizes can be a factor in how much you can fit on a screen at once.

The best option is to choose an intuitive control method, that perhaps adapts to the gameplay. For example, with a vertical scrolling space shooter game you could make the players ship constantly fire bullets with the player simply steering the ship around with their finger, and for a powerful shot the player could double tap their ship. It also pays to remember that fingers get in the way of the screen, so your gameplay should allow for rather large obstructions (for example: my hands are much bigger than my wife’s). If you have a character or ship that the character controls, consider positioning them above where the players touch point will be so that it is still visible during play[...]