58
votes
What are some ways to keep the player engaged in an endless game?
Provide visible goals for the player to achieve. For example:
Levels: If you click enough rockets, the game becomes more difficult. When you are lazy on a tight budget, then you can just tune some ...
- 112k
44
votes
How do you handle aspect ratio differences with Unity 2D?
What you want is to constrain the camera viewport on portrait or landscape(depending on your needs), by computing camera.orthographicSize property, so you can build ...
- 538
27
votes
What are some ways to keep the player engaged in an endless game?
I would suggest adding a mechanic that encourages emergent gameplay. Often emergent gameplay can be introduced by adding physics into your game.
For example, if a rocket explodes, it could launch ...
- 411
21
votes
Accepted
How to file down a fingernail mesh?
Myself, I'd approach this by keeping the mesh fixed and unchanging, and using a texture to shave away the edge.
You can make a signed distance field of your nail shape, and use this in your shader to ...
- 114k
17
votes
Why would I want to use multiple ad providers for my game?
One thing we do is use "mediators". Supersonic is a mediator. You install their plugin plus, let's say two others for simplicity, Vungle and AdColony. When an ad is requested, Supersonic figures out ...
Almo♦
- 6,399
16
votes
Accepted
What gamepad functionality can be assumed?
The standard which you will find on most platforms is:
Analog directional input left thumb
Digital directional input left thumb
Analog directional input right thumb
4 buttons right thumb
2 shoulder ...
- 112k
9
votes
Accepted
Why would I want to use multiple ad providers for my game?
While using only one ad network is fine for some projects, there are several problems that can arise. Using multiple ad networks can help resolve them. However, managing multiple ad networks can ...
- 206
9
votes
What are some ways to keep the player engaged in an endless game?
You need to have something that keeps changing. Interest will be replaced by boredom if it is the exact same game over and over. But it doesn't have to be.
Many classic games are the same game, but ...
- 1,220
8
votes
Is "Check your surroundings" warning on splash screen really needed for geolocation games?
Some geolocation games like Pokemon Go had quite a lot of bad press due to people getting injured while playing them. There were also cases of people trespassing on private property or entering ...
- 112k
8
votes
What are some ways to keep the player engaged in an endless game?
A user will not play a game where they do the same thing over and over. It will get boring and they will leave. As such, you need to make it feel like they're doing something new, even if the ...
- 1,197
7
votes
Accepted
Is a game like Subway Surfers suited for 2D or 3D?
Either one. Consider that even if the game world is in 3D, you can still use 2D for rendering. This is primarily a design decision. If you're more comfortable with 2D, then use 2D.
See these related ...
- 72.7k
6
votes
How do you handle aspect ratio differences with Unity 2D?
You typically don't need different sizes of assets - imported textures and sprites with automatically-generated mip maps will look nice when rendered at any size less than or equal to the original ...
- 455
6
votes
Cross-platform C++/OpenGL ES development (iOS/Android)
You may find my answer to a similar question here to be helpful.
You may also find it helpful to look into the source code of other solutions. The Godot Engine for example is a cross platform open ...
- 331
5
votes
Accepted
Why I need a backend for a mobile social game?
There are several reasons why to use a backend. Without backend, you can't really have states in your game. That means players start all over when they refresh the web page. The facebook API stuff ...
- 2,102
5
votes
Accepted
How to force Landscape Mode Unity3D Android Game?
In Unity, navigate to Edit -> Project Settings -> Player and choose the platform on the right. Android should be the 4th tab if you're using one of the latest versions of Unity.
Open the dropdown ...
- 176
4
votes
Should I switch to UDP for a mobile p2p game when considering 3G network?
3G is optimized for stuff like streaming video. It's terrible with regard to latency when talking about small bits of data. There's a reason multiplayer mobile games over 3G with split-second timing ...
Almo♦
- 6,399
4
votes
At what point of the game should I request users leave a review?
Option 3 sounds like a good idea, but! Don't prompt the user in a way that they have to perform an action to get past the reviewing. I find this highly annoying. Instead, create a button somewhere in ...
- 528
4
votes
How to handle multiplayer in JavaScript?
Both the question and the accepted answer were published in 2011, and the times have quite changed since :)
Websockets is quite prevalent, but an even better technology is WebRTC which allows for ...
- 635
4
votes
Accepted
Should UI be part of the game-loop?
Yes, generally, games are a single main loop.
Games in Java may have a separate main loop for each menu/screen/mode due to Java's idioms, but that of course does not solve your animation wait problem....
- 41.4k
4
votes
Are the same number of tiles displayed in an isometric game regardless of phone orientation?
This is a square grid shown using an isometric projection:
Note how it's wider than it's tall.
In fact, even if the grid was a rectangle with unequal sides, it still will be wider than taller, due ...
- 14.6k
4
votes
Accepted
Are the same number of tiles displayed in an isometric game regardless of phone orientation?
In a typical isometric-style projection, tiles are roughly twice as wide as they are tall (depending on whether you're using true isometric or its close cousin often used in games, the 2:1 dimetric ...
- 114k
4
votes
Accepted
How to adjust objects' coordinates and scale for different device resolutions?
This depends on how you've authored the objects.
3D objects and 2D sprites positioned in your scene's worldspace will not move, scale or change their worldspace transformations no matter what happens ...
- 114k
4
votes
Accepted
How to handle a Google Play game's privacy policy
Before you read this, I'm not a lawyer.
As far as I understand, the "Designed for Children" refers to apps that primarily target children, like educational apps, or cartoon-games. They do not affect ...
- 4,218
3
votes
Accepted
View-Update versus Model-update
Usually we call "logic" "update" and "view" "draw".
Ideally the view would only want to redraw when the logic has changed. It's true that if you slow down the update speed, everything will be slower. ...
- 2,101
3
votes
What framerate should I aim for on a mobile phone?
So first off, a disclaimer: I'm a Director at GameBench, and we make tools for measuring mobile app/game performance (frame rate and other metrics) for a lot of major companies (Rovio, Samsung, ...
- 131
3
votes
Accepted
Is this the typical approach to modern OpenGL UI & Text rendering, for mobile?
Your points seem reasonable.
For static elements that are set up once and never change, you can certainly pack them into a GL_STATIC_DRAW buffer and keep it alive ...
- 3,027
3
votes
Accepted
Testing SFML sf::Touch on ordinary PC
When compiling for a traditional Windows / Mac / Linux desktop setup, no this won't work. I dug through the SFML code and it turns out that the sf::Touch implementation won't really work unless you're ...
- 1,363
3
votes
Should particles check if they are in a region, or regions if particles are in them?
You may want to have each region contain a list of particles which are in it. Then, when you move each particle, check if it is in a new region - add it to the new region's particle list, and remove ...
- 39
3
votes
Do I need a server to connect two players in a mobile game?
Yes, you'll need a server if you want to connect players together over the internet (Facebook friends or otherwise). Without a "meeting place" (your server) your players wouldn't have the information ...
- 72.7k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible