You’re at the right place if you want to know about Indie Mobile Game Development. At the end of the article you’ll know how to start make a indie mobile game for android or ios.
What You’ll Learn?
- What are the Indie Games?
- How to develop an Indie Mobile Game?
- Is it worth to be an Indie game developer?
- Powerful Tips to Publish your independent mobile game?
What are Indie or Independent games?
Mobile gaming has rapid growth in recent years. Various game developers and top gaming companies are willing to dominate the mobile game industry. Like Ketchapp was bought by Ubisoft. Many of us played Ketchapp games this studio was bought by the giant gaming company Ubisoft.
Small teams or solo independent developer without any fame or financial support developing games are known to be independent game developers(Indie). These developers will take a long time to develop a single game depending on the design goal.
Developers found that publishing the game was easy with the stores like PlayStation Network, Steam, Xbox Live, Nintendo eShop. For Android, it is even more simple just create a Google Developer Account, for ios Apple Developer Program.
How to develop an Indie Mobile Game?
Choose whether you want to develop the game as a solo or a team. Teaming up will help you divide work and assign dedicated work to each.
Jeff Bezos said, “ If you can’t feed a team with 2 Pizzas it’s too large.”
Steps To Start Game Development:
- Idea
- Prototype
- Design
- Code
- Build
Idea
As a small team, it is better to start with simple 2D game concepts with simple controls. Tips to get mobile game ideas is play popular games on android and ios in casual category.
Spend a lot of time playing then find out how they are made and how the controls are and all that menu UI and how the concept is implemented.
Prototype
Once you get the idea start to work on it. Whether you can build your exact idea of what you’re assuming. If your concept is possible to build and easy to play. Then you can proceed successfully to design step.
Design
For the 2D game, design tools are Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Inkscape. These design tools are easy to learn, we recommend to use illustrator compared to other it provides Vector graphics, not pixel which will helpful to scale and compress. Divide your design workflow accordingly
- UI – Text, Menu Icons.
- Game Objects – Characters, Obstacles, Environment.
- Backgrounds- Game Backgrounds.
Remember you should not miss the harmony while designing your assets.
Video game developer should be able to develop a fair game-play design not too hard or too easy to play.
Code
Here, you need to select the “best mobile game development tool” it’s better to use multi-platform supported software like unity, unreal engine, Corona SDK. Unity 3D game engine is recommended to use.
Also Read: How to install Unity 3D Complete Setup?
Whether you’re an iPhone game developer or android unity is the to best write once and build for 27 platforms.
The programming language used is C#( C Sharp). Easily you learn from unity API Scripting documentation. As you code, you can check the real-time changes in your mobile using unity remote app in your mobile.
Also Read: Get Started With Unity Mobile Game Development.
You’ll need to import the assets designed using adobe illustrator and just drag and drop those required game objects into your game scene and if you want to perform an action or an event to that object just add a script component and write the code.
Build
The final step in development is building you game for targeted platform i.e., android, ios, Nintendo switch, windows phone, blackberry os. For Android Mobile Game Development you just need windows pc but for ios, you should have a Mac device.
Using unity you can build and run the game to your connected device. If you want to publish build you have to create a keystore a unique key is generated to upload it to the play store.
Is it worth to be an Indie game developer?
It depends on the individual interests but for people who want to earn money with mobile game development read this…
As per App Annie, the mobile game market is going to increase by 274% by 2020. Ios game development and Android are the ones a gamedeveloper should start with. According to Sensor Tower and App, Annie ios gets more revenue for their developers when compared to Android.
To be a successful indie game developer you should able to give time a minimum of 3 yrs. You won’t see a million downloads for you 1st game it’s hard. You should ready to fail for your first 10 games.
“Angry Birds was Rovio’s 51st Game”
Be patient and don’t’ expect results too soon and get disappointed. It’s worth if you give up your 9-5 job and ready to work as an indie for 2-3 yrs. It’s worth and will work if you don’t give up until you get 1 Million downloads.
If you’re are really passionate about game development, just jump into this and build a team start working.
Powerful Tips To Publish Your 1st Indie Mobile Game!
Your Indiegame will get attention if you follow these powerful tips for publishing your mobile game.
A Developer Website, most of the top indie games have a website for their game. You should have one.
The game maker should publish their indie game in the following stores excluding Google Play Store and App Store.
These are the alternative mobile app markets to publish your game and also free to signup and publish.
Uploading your indie mobile game in these stores will you give a lot of exposure to the mobile game. Once you have done, then approach different gaming blogs like Pocketgamer, Droidgamers, game bucket, touch arcade, stubbornmobilegaming. These mobile game news blogs will publish content of your game if they like it.
Approaching blog will help you a lot because they have a lot of social media following too. Next big thing is youtube review approach different mobile gaming review or phone review youtube channels and then ask them to review your game.
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