Tag Archives: iOS

Android, App Stores, Apple, Games, Gaming Industry, General, iOS, Mobile

The Science Behind Mobile Gaming Addiction

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Everyone who loves playing games, is at some point at risk of being converted to a full fledged video game addict (although this may not be a very bad thing :)).

And those in the business of making games, always aim at owning atleast one title that can lead to such addiction.

Mobile games today is a multi-billion dollar industry where just 0.15% of the mobile gamers bring in 50% of the revenue. The paying customers are small but they can be attributed as video game addicts. But they are not the only ones. There are some persistent players who keep grinding through levels without making any purchases, and they can be just as guilty of being addicts.

What makes games so enticing? Well, the science of mobile game addiction has been explained with an infographic below. Read it to find more –

AddictiveGamingSource: Online-Psychology-Degrees.org

ActionScript3, Adobe, App Stores, Apple, Devices, Facebook, Flash, Flash Platform, Games, General, IGameStudio, iOS, iTunes, Mobile

Stop That Silly Chicken game for iPad

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Stop That Silly Chicken

With the successful release of “Stop That Silly Chicken”, it is heartening to say that the game was developed using Adobe AIR for the iOS platform.

Stop That Silly Chicken is currently available on the iPad and iPhones. The game uses Milkman Games native extensions for social media and advertising. It also uses a native extension for in-app alerts.

Silly Chicken is a character owned by 9X Media, a brand providing entertainment on television through their various music and cartoon channels.

The game concept revolves around Silly Chicken who runs around a kitchen table in a quest to steal and break the eggs kept safely in a bowl. The player has to tap Silly Chicken before he reaches the table. The player can collect game coins from piggy banks and use them to make purchases from the game store that will make it easier to trap Silly Chicken. The game has 2 modes – Survival and Time mode and both are easy to understand and play. The game is completely free using an advertising model with Admob.

I’ve been reading the comments of the players since its release and glad to see it being liked. It seem that the idea of tapping Silly Chicken and seeing its reactions through different animations is funny for many.

Please download the game if you haven’t already and spread the word about it!

Mariam

ActionScript3, Adobe, AIR on Android, Android, Apple, Flash, Flash Platform, Games, General, Mobile

The story of Adobe AIR and game development

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Will Flash ever be able to get rid of it’s tag of being a quick prototype and animation tool? In India where we have a large developer base working on small games and animations for the web, the stereotype that a lot of people hold about Flash will probably always stay true.

Whenever the word Flash appears, people expect magic and quick turnaround times with development. At such times, the fact that “Flash” is going to be used for a more a sophisticated development on limited memory devices is completely ignored.

Whenever we begin work on a game on iOS or Android, my first suggestion is that if technology is not a restriction, we can provide game development services using the Adobe AIR platform. Most of the times there is never an argument on that because we are trusted to know our work well and deliver projects according to the brief given to us irrespective of the framework or tools.

The trouble comes when I explain what Adobe AIR really is. The fact is that Adobe AIR is a cross platform runtime using Flash and AS3 to write applications across platforms. But on hearing the word “Flash”, there is an instant expectation of quick results even for complex games.

So I’m sharing a list of of points that I felt kept coming up during AIR development on mobile/tablet game.

  • Development with AIR may be familiar ground because of AS3, but the development workflow is the same as with other technologies, especially with good OOPs practices.
  • There are plenty of frameworks available which provide support to Adobe AIR to enhance game development. A developer who wants to give the best to the project considers the time he/she will be spending on including those frameworks in the game.
  • Development of game logic or controls is not about copy pasting code from different places. Each game logic has its flow and limitations which cannot be solved by existing code (unless if it is a port of a game owned by the developer).
  • Mobiles have limited memory. There is a possibility of the game taking up too much runtime memory thus leading to crashes and low frame rate. Optimization of code and graphics is top priority when developing for non-web platforms.
  • Sprite sheets, no matter how much fun they may be to work with, are not easy for replacing the graphics in a game.
  • Compilation of game for devices take time. The workflow of deploying and debugging a game on devices is a time consuming process.
  • Comparison to an existing game is fine, but assuming that the game could have been developed in 2 days and wanting the same time frame for a new game development is an unheard story.
  • Any existing game code of a web game cannot be picked and pushed on Adobe AIR. If the game was developed using AS2, the process of converting the code to AS3 is tedious. What’s even more tedious is optimizing badly written code.

I’m ranting about the way game development with AIR is thought of by some people in India and it really saddens me to think they take it for granted. I know this will change over time, but till then we have to bear the brunt and keep educating people about it.

Mariam

ActionScript3, Adobe, Apple, iOS

Adobe ships Flash Player 11.4 and AIR 3.4

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Adobe has released the new version of the Flash Player 11.4 and Adobe AIR 3.4. The runtimes have a list of new features, enhancements and bug fixes. Adobe has also upgraded the technology behind the AS3 Reference for the Adobe Flash Platform (ASDoc).

The updates to the runtimes are very critical, especially for mobile development. I had filed a bug about using the Adobe Native Extension (ANE) with Adobe AIR 3.3 on iOS some weeks back. Hoping the new release would be easier to work with ANE.

Flash Player and Adobe AIR Feature List

ActionScript 3.0 Reference for the Adobe Flash Platform

Mariam

App Stores, Apple, Devices, Games, General, iOS, Mobile

The Act Game review

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Playing the Act Game is like a watching a beautiful movie. It took me back to the times when I used to watch the classic Disney cartoons on TV, with the only difference being The Act on iOS has some interactivity to keep the user engaged as any game ideally should. I thought of reviewing this game simply because it has a very different gaming experience seen after a long time.

The story begins with Edgar a window washer with the City Medical Hospital spotting Sylvia the nurse through the hospital window and instantly falling in love with her. He dreams of romancing her, but is interuppted by his boss. He is forced to continue cleaning the windows with his sleepy brother Wally when all of a sudden, his brother enters the hospital room through the window and gets into an empty bed. The story then takes Edgar inside the hospital and through various situations involving Sylvia and other characters to rescue his brother from being mistaken to be a patient requiring a brain transplant.

The game animations play very smoothly. The artists have used the classical hand drawn animation style, so the quality of animations are very high. The characters are superbly designed and one can understand their emotions through their expressions.

The controls are very simple involving sliding the finger on the left or right side of the screen. All game interactivity have Edgar responding to the player swipes.  The music too is beautifully rendered and suits the game perfectly. The only issue with the game is that is has a very small game length. One can easily finish it in 30-45 mins.

I remember reading somewhere that the team working on this concept had been test marketing it since 2007 but cancelled launching it then. It has finally released in 2012 on the iOS platform published by Chillingo and is worth a play just for its uniqueness.

Android, Android Marketplace, Apple, Facebook, Games, General, iOS, Mobile

Reasons not to play a game on mobiles

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I was looking at my devices today and tried understanding my game playing behaviour.

Out of the devices I use, my iOS device has more games than any other device. Next comes the Android and Symbian devices where I have some games installed, but have never played them (don’t know why!!). Out of all the current 100 iOS games, I only play around 4-5 very regularly and another 4-5 occasianally.

So what is it that gets me to download a game but not play it? I thought through some of the points and this is what I think.

1. Creative Inspiration – So we’ve played Fruit Ninja, Angry Birds and Cut the Rope on the iOS platform. Now, do we really need a game with the mechanics of Fruit Ninja, bird characters from Angry Birds and a name inspired by Cut the Rope?.
If you’ve played “Cut the Birds” and you’ll know what I am talking about (the game is now taken off the App store and has another version Cut the Birds 2). One of the primary resons why games fail to connect with users is that they lack originality and just end up being poor imitations of successful IPs.

2. Herd Mentality – Farmville created history with online social gaming, but then more games decided to follow suit with farm themes or similar “Click and Collect” mechanics. And were they successful? Probably yes, but for how long is the real question! I don’t remember the last time I played a Facebook connected game because of the “Follow the Herd” mentality used while writing concepts.

3. Game Tutor – As a casual game player, I really don’t like a casual game constantly throwing pop ups at me to teach me how to play the game. It breaks the flow and can be very obtrusive. I think a casual game should be self explanatory or atleast with minimum non-obtrusive teaching.
Help pop-ups may sometimes be necessary for games, especially strategy and time management games, which are competitive and require a learning curve to progress, so I’m not completely averse to them.

4. Forgotten Icon – Many times when I reach out for my device to play a game, I notice installed forgotten apps. And then when I recall them after looking at them, I wonder if it makes sense to ever play them again.
Forgetting to play an installed app is nothing but a result of an average game-play, designed to be non intuitive, and not great enough to get us engaged after the first couple of minutes initial play.
Prototyping and testing an idea with people trusted for feedback is the best way forward. Being open to criticisms is only getting better at designing and developing a better game.

5. User Experience – I was playing a turn based game against the computer AI recently. I won’t name the game, but the mechanics were as simple as Tic Tac Toe. However, everytime I was to play a turn or the AI was to play a turn, I would have a big popup message thrown in front of me informing me that it was my turn or the computer’s turn to play.
This is an example of a terrible User Experience design because it ends up irritating me/the player with constant reminders during every turn. A definate reason for me not to replay the game.

6. Buggy Pop-ups – What happens when I am playing a game (Chess for example), and I play my turn before the game can alert me of my turn. Now the game logic gets stuck at this point where it has my turn pop-up to display on screen but knows in the background that it is the AI who will play next. My game hangs at this point and I’m stuck staring at a game screen where I can’t progress. I have to shut down the game and restart it.
Will i play this game again? Only if it has an addictive game-play and value for time.

7. Noisy Screechy SFX – One usually plays a game when they want to take a short break in-between or after work or sometimes as a part of their learning process. Poor sound effects or background music really make me shut down the game even if I really need to play it.

8. Where’s the Entertainment – Some games just lack entertainment. And I can’t define this any further. Game development is a coordinated process and going wrong in any of the phases can lead to a non entertaining game.

9. Non accessibility of content – Today most games are sold through mobile app markets. iTunes gives the easiest access to download games irrespective of the iTunes version or the device OS. Similarly Android too offers ease of use of the Android Marketplace. For the others, it’s not been very easy at all times.

Mariam

Android, Android Marketplace, Apple, CSS, Devices, HTML, iOS, Mobile, Websites

PhoneGap Framework for Mobiles

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I recently spent some time studying the PhoneGap framework with the purpose of creating content for Android devices. PhoneGap is an Open Source Mobile Framework that allows developers to author native applications with web technologies such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS. PhoneGap currently supports 6 platforms including Android, iOS, Blackberry, Palm WebOS and Symbian WRT (including QT).

Working with the framework made me realize how easy it is for any web developer to target multiple mobile platforms without having to write the native code, and yet achieve cross platform compatibility with the same content.

In other words, the content layouting is flexible and can run across different screen sizes and platforms without having to change the any part of the core code.

The framework usage is very simple and well explained on the website. Once you are setup with the framework within your preferred development environment, the only effort goes in writing your HTML files and compiling the builds with the HTML assets to test on the actual device. PhoneGap also has its own API functions which makes use of features such as Network, Accelerometer, use of Camera, Events, Data Storage etc.

Performance wise, it is good, but animating too many objects around the screen drops the framerate. I tried running a game and got a FPS of around 7-8 on older Android devices and around 12 on the newer ones such as the Nexus One.

Perhaps the biggest challenge was integrating jquery for database interaction, where network calls constantly failed. It was later understood that PhoneGap takes a little time to load, so if the device is not ready and the API calls to the network are made, then the network calls fail.

 

From the code above it is noticed that in order to use PhoneGap we have to load the phonegap.js script into the HTML file. This is one of the 2 code bases required for calling any PhoneGap functions (the other code base is native and is compiled when building the device build).

When the HTML loads, the first function called is the onLoad() function which checks whether PhoneGap is fully loaded. This check is done using the onDeviceReady event.

When the device is ready, an onDeviceReady event is fired. The next step is to check for network. This too is done using the PhoneGap functions – NetworkStatus. If the network exists, then the network related calls using jquery are used, otherwise an alert is sent to the user informing of no network.

I’ll soon be uploading a PhoneGap Android app, and will share the link for downloading when ready.

Mariam

 

Adobe, Android, Apple, Flash, General, Mobile

FITC Mobile 2010

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I’ve been reading about the FITC Mobile Conference recently, and am glad to know that it is back in it’s second year in Toronto, Canada. The event is scheduled to be held between 16th-18th September this year.

FITC is slated as one of the only events covering all aspects of mobile content development, such as iPhone/iPad, Android, Flash 10.1, Windows Mobile, HTML5, Unity, Marketing, Usability, and other relevant topics in the mobile world.

The event will have a good mix of technical and non-technical topics as well related to marketing, funding, and other business aspects of mobile development. Besides presentations, the event will have pre-conference workshops, demonstrations, and panel discussions for those attending.

You can go and check the event link to know more about the speakers and the companies presenting. It’s quite an impressive list.

Currently FITC has an Early Bird offer on the conference and pre-conference workshop ticket prices.

They have also offered a further discount of $50 on any event ticket. Please message me if you want to attend this event and avail the discount, and I will send across the code.

Mariam