Game Development 101 - Beginning Android Games - page 65

actually be achieved by playing games with an analytical mindset. Push away the entertainment
factor for a moment, and concentrate on deconstructing the game. Once you're done, come
back and read on. We are going to design a very simple game on paper.

Game Design: The Pen Is Mightier Than the Code
As we said earlier, it is rather tempting to fire up the IDE and just hack together a nice tech
demo. This is OK if you want to prototype experimental game mechanics and see if those
actually work. However, once you do that, throw away the prototype. Pick up a pen and some
paper, sit down in a comfortable chair, and think through all high-level aspects of your game.
Don't concentrate on technical details yet—you'll do that later on. Right now, you want to
concentrate on designing the user experience of your game. The best way to do this is by
sketching up the following things:

ï?® The core game mechanics, including a level concept if applicable

ï?® A rough backstory with the main characters

ï?® A list of items, power-ups, or other things that modify the characters,

mechanics, or environment if applicable

ï?® A rough sketch of the graphics style based on the backstory and characters

ï?® Sketches of all the screens involved, diagrams of transitions between

screens, and transition triggers (for example, for the game-over state)

If you've peeked at the Table of Contents, you know that we are going to implement Snake on
Android. Snake is one of the most popular games ever to hit the mobile market. If you don't
know about Snake already, look it up on the Web before reading on. We'll wait here in the
meantime. . .

Welcome back. So, now that you know what Snake is all about, let's pretend we just came
up with the idea ourselves and start laying out the design for it. Let's begin with the
game mechanics.

Core Game Mechanics
Before we start, here's a list of what we need:

ï?® A pair of scissors

ï?® Something to write with

ï?® Plenty of paper

In this phase of our game design, everything's a moving target. Instead of carefully crafting
nice images in Paint, Gimp, or Photoshop, we suggest you create basic building blocks out
of paper and rearrange them on a table until they fit. You can easily change things physically
without having to cope with a silly mouse. Once you are OK with your paper design, you can
take photos or scan the design for future reference. Let's start by creating those basic blocks of
our core game screen. Figure 3-12 shows you our version of what is needed for our core
game mechanics.