special effects animation

[huZba]

2 - No chorded button input

This means that the phone only recognizes a single key at a time.  Sucks, right?

And yeah, the mixed resolution platform sucks donkey dick, pardon my english.  At a larger size it'd be fine, you could use vectors to compensate, but decent display at say 100x150 is nearly impossible without very careful pixel art.  If you can, design you game to scale WITHOUT needing to scale the actual assets!!

I've never come across a phone that didn't allow you to press multiple buttons at the same time, but i have seen a lot of games that don't allow more than one button to be pressed. As far as i can tell, most nokia and sony-ericsson phones don't have the problem, so it might be the ones that are more popular in the states, if there is any, some siemens phones maybe. Then again it might be some special hax by our coders that they somehow got around it.

As for scaling stuff..... a lot of times i wish i had trained monkeys to do that for me. I've attempted once to do game graphics that fit for all phone sizes without giving gameplay advantage to any of the phones and ended up in something that people like in smaller screens since the sprites are relatively big in them, so go figure. Good thing we can start to fade out and drop support for the smallest screensizes in a year or two.

For other mobile gimmicks, from what i can tell, using big sprite sheets with one global palette for all graphics isn't necessary. Like instead of having global 16 colors for one sheet that has all the graphics can be slower than having each sprite separatelly with their own palettes, since phones don't have that much restrictions for actual palettes. Also having a little program and a tiling system that automatically replaces large flat color areas with code-drawn rectangles is really handy.

I once thought about having flickering transparency, but that doesn't work cause some phones tend to have really low framerate, even for the simplest games, like pong.

@helm
There are some upcoming hardware systems that should ease making games for future phones. Graphics acceleration chips/software that with luck will be available with more than one manufacturer. The coolest things i've seen easily surpass systems like the PSP for example.
The current standards are horrible and ancient, so here's hoping that all the phone manufacturers jump in a bandwagon and start using the same architecture.

[sir-knight]

that's an awesome example, wish there were more

I think I'm going to have to resort to more digging through some old nes games to see how it was approached, and maybe a few early snes games before they figured that they could do alpha blending. It will be tricky to do any hardcore effects because I'm limited to whatever framerate the lowest end phone is capable of, so maybe a 100 ms frame delay when I need around 40-80 ms to do fast action effects. It'll be quite a challenge. Sadly though, because of the terms of my work contract I can't post anything up as an example as to how I'll be developing the effects.

[sir-knight]

I've never come across a phone that didn't allow you to press multiple buttons at the same time, but i have seen a lot of games that don't allow more than one button to be pressed. As far as i can tell, most nokia and sony-ericsson phones don't have the problem, so it might be the ones that are more popular in the states, if there is any, some siemens phones maybe. Then again it might be some special hax by our coders that they somehow got around it.

You have to understand that even though if some phones were to be able to support chorded input, that you can't design a game with gameplay elements that use that input if you want to preserve portability. If 10 phones support the feature, you can't justify a 4 month development time for a team of 4 people to support only 10 phones. You need to design the game so that it will be portable to 100 phones in the 4 months you have to maximize cash flow, otherwise you will not make enough  money to pay your guys who made that game for only 10 phones which only 1 of 5 or 6 people might have, and only a few know that there are even games available on phones.

It sucks having to be designing for the lowest common denominator, because there is huge potential in emerging technologies. some phones out there have screens the resolution of TVs, with the same aspect ratios. Those are the platforms that are tasty to develop on, not to mention quaalcom's brew phones that run variants of C++ On a game we recently released for BREW phones, we tried to crash or bog down a motorola e815 with about 20 spritesheets at 250-200 px and 15 tilesets at 256x256 in a stress test, amazingly the thing ran at full speed with little optimization.

Of course, after optimizing the hell out of the java port, we got the full version of the game to run on the ericsson w810 and a few of the newer blackberries, so things are moving towards more freedom in art development. I just wish we had palette swapping and bit flipping like on a GBA so we wouldn't need east/west sprites and multiple spritesheets for color variant elements.

Alpha blending is just a tip of my wish list 

[huZba]

To me it seems like the phones with one button input are a minority and can be completely neglected in the near future, though one button gameplay is good for mobile games in general. It might be different in the states, where the general phone population is more dated than in europe. Though majority of the phones here as well are oooooold.. damn people, buy new phones   

Most fun are the phones that are really fast on paper, like 233mhz processors and whatnot, but lack proper java integration so they run everything ridicilously slow anyway. Sooo, the one reliable test software is the spmark which gives solid numbers http://www.futuremark.com/

[ndchristie]

every phone i've ever used could only take a single button push at a time; at most they would input one command, then the other.  But yeah, i am in a technologically poor part of the states (southern new england, RI in specific, does everything it can to avoid real technology it seems.  My father's house is still a neighborhood that cannot get cable or highspeed internet!)

[robotacon]

My phone runs Flash Lite and got WiFi, nuff said.