How to design an elegant mobile game?

Designing a mobile game is a very interesting idea, in theory, there is no fundamental difference between developing a smartphone or tablet game with other platform game designs. Mobile games are very similar to other types and platforms in traditional system properties, whether you want to create a happy farm, call of Duty or chess.
But in practice, trying to create a successful mobile game is entirely another matter. There are many other concerns, from the saturation of the market, hard to find, to play stereotypes and equipment size factors, for these reasons, as a designer to create a good mobile game is like playing "difficult mode."
All of these different factors come together, meaning that the most successful mobile games tend to be elegant rule sets. That is, they need to work hard to become deeper and meaningful, but at the same time they need to be generated from a set of minimal simple rules. There must be more gorgeous baroque games, but no matter what you measure the success of the standard, there are few successful mobile games sticking to the gorgeous style.
So how do we implement these elegant designs in the game? Let's take a look at two major features of mobile games-game duration and interactive methods, and look at several system design methods for mobile platforms.
　　Game session duration
Players have a very different game than other platforms. Players need to play in a fragmented time, such as queuing or going to the toilet, but they also want the game to be more meaningful and can play for long periods. Research shows that iOS gaming sessions are growing in between one minute or two, while most mobile games actually play more time at home than on the road. To make your game in both cases, balancing the fun and reward mechanisms is a very challenging issue.
To help us think about the design of these two situations, it is helpful to think of the game as a set of feedback loops. At any point in time, your game has a core cognitive model. On this basis, you need to do something to get the game to give you feedback, which in turn will affect this to refine the model.
The key point about these feedback loops is that they are fragmented, and there may be any number of nested feedback loops at any point in time. For example, let's think about what happens when we play Angry Birds.
Let's start with the action, each shot the bird goes through the map to achieve the desired goal, it also gives you the corresponding feedback: Did you destroy the box or pig you want to destroy? Is the bird's ejection track (which is still visible after the bird landed) and is it consistent with what you think? This information will affect your future ejection.

To step back, the smallest unit of measurement for this game is the level. Each level also serves as a closed-loop for its own feedback and rewards: The clearance allows you to get one to three stars, encouraging you to develop the necessary skills to truly ' conquer ' it.
In general, all of these levels themselves form a feedback loop and narrative pattern, and over time you can clearly see the overall process, and they let you know what level of skill you have with respect to the overall system.
We can continue to extend, but I think the basic concept is clear. Again, this is not just the idea of a mobile game. If you lack the impulse to play your game all the time or see personal development in general, you can say that there is a lot of room for improvement in your game no matter what the platform.
The length of the game session design is very important. It can be a game of instant feedback fun, and it also has the smallest systemic cycle long enough to be fun even with a few minutes of playing. In two minutes of playing Angry Birds, you can experience multiple full iterations of the game's feedback loop, even in such a short session that still gives a sense of well-being. At the same time, the presence of a higher level of feedback loops means that the fun of these micro-moments does not undermine the long-term meaningful gameplay experience.
　　Controller Challenges
The platform for video games-palm, PC and even mall cabinets-has a large number of inputs relative to smartphones or tablets. Many great mobile games find unique ways to use multi-touch or iphone accelerators instead of displaying a large number of virtual buttons on the screen, but iOS devices are still much less input than other forms of digital games. This creates a difficult design challenge: how can I make the limited input game system more interesting, meaningful and deeper? This is a topic that is frequently discussed by students of game design majors, and creating a one-click game for aspiring designers is an eternal subject, but the limitations of iOS often make it not only an academic issue. In the final analysis, this is a game-like problem: How do you create a simple and friendly game system without abandoning the depth and gameplay of the game on other platforms?
A common way to build interactions in a game is to reduce the formal elements of the game to "nouns" and "verbs." Let's use "Super Mario" for example. Mario consists of two "verbs"--he can run and jump. Mario's challenge comes from the introduction and organization of a series of nouns used to give the verbs a space to play. These nouns form different obstacles, and you must use the interesting and unique combination of the two verbs to overcome these obstacles.

Of course, Mario would be very bored if he only ran or jumped. But even if you just need 6 keys (4 arrow keys and run-jump keys) to play the game of Mario, want to achieve on the touch screen is also very complex in many aspects, which is why very few 2D platform games can be successful on the iOS platform.
So how to make the game more content and more complex under the limited input? With this noun and verb as the framework, there are basically three ways to increase the complexity of the game. We can add a new input, add a new verb using the existing input, or we can assign the existing verb to more nouns and use new meanings to render the verb. The first option is usually to increase the complexity that we do not want to see, but the other two handles the appropriate words very effectively. Let's look at some examples of well-known mobile games that use these methods to add extra depth without changing the core game interaction.

　　Hundreds
Hundreds is a good example of adding new verbs without adding to the complexity of the game verbs.

Initially, "Touch bubbles to grow" is the only verb that needs to be dealt with, and as the game progresses, new types of objects are introduced: bubbles that slowly shrink over time, pierce the gears of the touched object, and freeze the bubbles in place in the puck. These things can easily become very complex, but it is important that they do not break the "click on an object to do what rules", although the number of possible verbs will be quite large, but they are in a simple way consistent. The interaction between them is very rich, such as using ice hockey to freeze dangerous gears and make them harmless. This interaction is satisfying, and the basic method of interacting with the system is still quite simple.
　　Threes
Puzzle game Threes embodies another way of not changing anything you can do in the game, but managing it at the level of complexity and strategy.

In this game, its rules remain the same. From start to finish, the only verb is the "slide slider", except that there is no change. Because system rules are a new object at a predictable frequency, the complexity of the game is the natural result of the process. It's easy to make a decision when the game starts with a small number of squares on the screen. When you start balancing the underlying numbers to create new higher numbers, the same verb suddenly has more meaning and nuance behind it.
Both are great games and they provide a simple way to play on the surface, but they are handled with great depth on how to add complexity and the meaning of verbs. The approach may be different, but it's a commendable job to move some complexity away from the entry level, making it easier to get started.
　　 Elegance
Now we have explored the design game through two different angles. Thinking about your system's feedback loops and managing iterations of relative lengths can help you design things that are fun, whether it's 10 seconds or 1 hours. Recognizing that you can increase the complexity of your game by dealing with the verbs in the game, you can increase the game's depth of strategy without sacrificing access to new players.
In the end, the two concepts show similar results: The depth of the game and the complexity of the system, although relevant, do not necessarily need to be equivalent. The complexity of focusing on your game is that it helps to get as many new players as possible in your game, and encourages the game to pick up and play without losing depth or sacrificing long-time entertainment.
Again, these concepts are not new in the game design world. In particular, design blogger Dan Cook talked about a lot of nested feedback loops in his article "The Chemistry of Game design", as well as Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark's book "A Game Design Vocabulary" In-depth exploration of what the game's verb conceptualization implies.
But these problems have worsened in the mobile platform. In the context of a mobile platform, it is important to keep the lowest-level cycle of the game as short and self-contained as possible, but at the same time cannot lose the game depth of a larger vision. The usability of touch-screen controls makes it difficult to add complexity and nuance to the input hierarchy, so it is more important than ever to provide experienced players with advanced gaming experiences on higher-level systems. The harsh nature of mobile games means that elegant design is not just an ideal condition, but a necessary feature. Recognizing that simplicity is not a superficial concept is essential to a well-designed mobile game.

This article was selected from: http://www.spasvo.com/news/html/2014125111442.html

How to design an elegant mobile game?