Mobile game development

How I started developing mobile games

Recently, I was asked to help to design a mobile cross-platform multiplayer game to promote national board-game Togyz Kumalak https://www.iggamecenter.com/info/en/toguzkumalak.html

Before we get into it, let me tell you that this is the first time I have touched mobile game development. Today I would like to breifly describe the steps I took, to make this project come to life. Who knows, maybe someone can find this information useful.

Game development, just like any other development, starts from a concept, or an idea. This part was easy, since the game rules are defined and precise, not much to add here. Just make sure you have learned the game well, know all the situations that can occure, i.e. you have the algorythm of the game in your head in some pseudo-code variant.

Next, pick a platform. If you want the game to be popular, you will want to use iOS and Android, since those are the big giants that have biggest share of the mobile market. Each platform has its own language and IDE to develop applications (objective-C and swift for iOS and java for Android). I didn't want to write the code two times, since the time was of the essence, so I went to discover some way to write the game one time and then port it on both platform with as less hassle as possible. I considered Corona, Xamarin, PhoneGap. After messing with them for couple of hours I decided to go with Corona SDK. The main reason for it was the LUA language which was interesting to me and new.

Learning the LUA language (or whatever you decide to work on) is essential part of success. For me it was not diffierent from other languages that I already knew. It felt like some mix of Pascal and C++. To make sure that I understand the basics, I made the text-version prototype first. The prototype was just displaying the board using only text elements, no sounds or pictures.

Once you have the prototype working - go for graphics and sounds. I asked my friend who is a great designer - Timur Sher'yazdanov - to help me with graphics. He made awesome images, and i quickly replaced the text elements and did the necessary adjustments to make the game look the way I wanted.

I had multiple skin options available to make the game more appealing.

After that I started writing the AI (artificial intelligence) - this was the tough part since there wasn't much literature out there on Togyz Kumalak game. It seemed to me that it was easier to make AI for chess or backgammon than Togyz Kumalak.

And the last part was polishing the game with soundsa nd mutiplayer. I didn't want some fancy dedicated game server for this project so I went with Google Play Game Services and Apple Game Center. Those servers suited my needs very well and didn't require much learning to implement in LUA language.

So, this was it. The process of creating the mobile game.

Now if you would like to learn about the actual coding and implementation of the algorythm I'm planning to set up free courses in Astana (Kazakhstan) to spread my knowledge and teach other idie developers and students on how to get started with mobile development.

Thank you for your attention and I hope you will enjoy the game (it will be soon out of beta-testing stage and available on google play and apple appstore, i'll post and update later).