Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Battery life
Believe it or not, the most used feature of a smart phone is, well, to make and receive
phone calls. With such an important function being the mobile device's primary use,
it would be quite tragic to keep the device from performing such a task because a
game uses up all of the device's battery power. For this reason, one very important
characteristic of a mobile application (including games and mobile web applications)
is how well it conserves power.
The more data the application needs to process, the more electricity it will require
to do so. If the game spends much of its time performing complex calculations, it is
likely to quickly drain the device's battery sooner than one would like it to. It is im-
perative that your mobile games use the least possible amount of power so that the
player can enjoy the game as much as possible, while still saving enough battery
power so that the device can serve its most fundamental purposeā€”to make phone
calls.
Browser differences
If you thought all your browser compatibility issues would go away once you started
focusing your web development efforts on mobile devices, think again. Not only are
there differences between the various mobile browsers themselves (just as there are
differences on their desktop counterparts), but also not every HTML5 API and fea-
ture available on a given desktop browser is available on the same browser's mobile
version.
Some features are in fact available on a mobile browser, but the performance is still
a very long way from being acceptable. One simple example that we will see in the
game developed in this chapter is CSS animations. Depending on how creative you
get with the animation, the mobile browser might have a very hard time handling
the animation, while on a desktop browser the computations and rendering power
needed to display the animation smoothly and consistently are quite trivial.
In summary, when defining the concrete way in which your mobile application is to
be implemented, keep in mind that some APIs and features will simply have to be
thrown out, lest the application performs at unacceptable levels.
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