Smartphones today are becoming extremely innovative and powerful. Screens are becoming bigger and bigger and so does the resolution and graphics.
New engines are used to develop mobile games and PC games are now even made available on mobile. But with this rate of development and improvement, is it likely that mobile gaming is going to be on par with PC gaming?
So in this category, the PC is the clear winner. The industry of PC gaming is cooking a more innovative way to not just offer a more convenient and efficient way for PC gamers to interact but to also flop the mobile gaming prices. Crowdfunding, along with the popularity of indie scenes, PC gaming is set to become more affordable than ever. In the meantime, mobile gaming easily wins this comparison with flying colors, especially if we take into account the game price to hardware category.
So before getting started and running with it, you need a primer to point you in the right direction, to steer you clear of the most common mistakes, and to maximise your chances of success. This is the chapter for you. This point may sound too obvious, but it can be very easy to miss. And missing it is often the undoing of a well-intentioned design. You can design games to teach and persuade as discussed later , but if such real-world objectives supersede meaningful gameplay, they will undermine your chances for success.
First and foremost, a game needs to be enjoyed. At the end, players get a letter grade to represent how well they did.
If you want to win the game, then the right choice each step of the way is to save your money and not spend any of it. On anything. Separating what people should do from what gets rewarded destroys the intended message. The reason testing is so important in game development is that most video games are highly dynamic experiences. The flow of events changes from moment to moment, and each decision the player makes leads to a multiplicity of outcomes.
Most games are also programmed with an element of randomness, so the same player never has quite the same experience twice. Multiplayer games throw even more unpredictability into the mix. Without actually seeing the game in action, you cannot reliably anticipate how it will work. Exploit it at every opportunity when designing your game. Be harshly critical. Do you enjoy playing it? Is it frustrating? Is it boring? Is it too hard to figure out what to do?
Young people have much more leisure time than grown-ups, and many of us remember spending long periods of our childhood playing games. Large segments of games are marketed toward children, and many of these games feature kid-friendly mascots like Pikachu or Mario. But with a large market catering to them, kids also have the latitude to be very discerning consumers. Kids often select a popular title specifically because they feel it will raise their social status among their friends.
Because these games can be very demanding of their time, your idea must offer a pretty compelling value proposition for them to sacrifice minutes or hours that could otherwise be spent with their pastime of choice.
We also know that kids are only the minority of people who play video games. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, 82 per cent of gamers are over age 18, and 29 per cent are 50 or older Figure 5.
So consider targeting your game to an older age group while keeping it accessible to a broad range of ages. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is an amazing action game. It unfolds over dozens of hours, during which you encounter waves of enemies exquisitely balanced against the resources available to you, interact with teammates controlled by artificial intelligence AI algorithms, and fight through varied locations that provide no unfair advantage to either you or your targets.
Call of Duty also took years to make and a team comprising dozens of designers, artists, and engineers at a cost of many millions of dollars. Racing a car. Throwing a basketball. Unless you absolutely have to play that game on launch day, never pay full price for a PC game—they go on sale way too often! Everyone knows about the notorious Steam sales, and there are a lot of strategies to getting the best possible price during the blowout week only buy a game if it's a flash sale, daily deal, or if it's the last day of the sale.
But what a lot of people don't do is look beyond Steam : places like Amazon, Gamefly, and other sites often have even better prices, and their games will activate on Steam as if you bought it from them. So use a site like IsThereAnyDeal.
Oh, and make sure you know how long each game takes to beat , so you don't buy more games than you can play! I'm firmly in the mouse-and-keyboard camp, but despite what fanboys might tell you, some games are just better with a gamepad. The Xbox is our favorite , but there are a lot of good options, and they're easy to set up.
Lots of games should actually support gamepads out of the box, but if one of your favorites doesn't, you can use a tool like JoyToKey on Windows or Joystick Mapper on the Mac to make it work.
If you're a PC gamer, chances are you use Steam to manage your games. And if you use Steam, chances are you have way too many games. Luckily, Steam actually has a few built-in features that can help you manage that overflowing list. You can manually add games to different categories and genres, or do it automatically with a tool like Depressurizer.
Search is also useful, and Steam has a few different "Views" that can make it easier to browse in certain circumstances. Ever had a hard drive fail with all your saved games on it? Or tried to play a game on another computer that didn't have your progress on it? Join , subscribers and get a daily digest of news, geek trivia, and our feature articles. By submitting your email, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. It should be fairly easy to figure out which programs will slow things down.
Downloading big files with a BitTorrent client, encoding video, extracting files from an archive — these can all put load on your system and dramatically slow things down. Of course, if you want to squeeze out all the resources you can for a particularly demanding game, you may want to close all non-essential applications while playing the game.
To determine which programs are using a lot of resources, use the Task Manager. Open the Task Manager right-click your taskbar and select Task Manager and use it to see which applications are using up a lot of resources. You can generally tell if your hard drive is grinding away by looking at the hard drive light on your computer. Graphics drivers are the software glue that sits between your graphics card and the games running on your computer.
Some new games may even refuse to run if you have graphics drivers that are too outdated. Read our guide to identifying your graphics hardware and updating your graphics drivers for more information. Older games may not know what to do when they see new hardware and may default to the lowest settings, while some games may use too high a graphical setting and may slow down.
For example, your hardware may not be good enough to play on Ultra, but may be easily able to handle High. In this case, you can select High and then increase individual graphics settings. Different games have different settings and different game engines perform differently, so some settings may be more demanding in some games. Feel free to play with these settings and see how they affect your game performance.
Some settings may have little impact on your performance, while others will have great impact. If you use a lower resolution in a game, the game will appear noticeably blurrier. Of course, this is a trade-off — selecting a higher resolution will require your graphics hardware to do more work.
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