Mobile Game Engines:
Interviews with Mobile Game Engine Developers

What does it take to create for the creative?

Mobile Game Engines: Interviews with Mobile Game Engine Developers

How do you create and maintain a mobile game engine for iOS or Android?

Mobile game developers select and work with commodity mobile game engines although do not have a deep insight into how mobile game engines are developed and maintained. It is very interesting to take a moment to think about the constraints and heavy demands put on the developers of mobile game engines, such as:

  • How do engine developers maintain a high-level of software quality while keeping abreast of the continuous changes to the devices and their capabilities?
  • How do engine developers design their APIs for use by a large and diverse base of developers?
  • How do engine developers structure their projects and manage their teams of developers and contributors?
  • What is like to have hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of deployed games built on technology that they envisioned and put into the world?

Book Blurb

“This book contains a total of 22 exclusive interviews on the making of start-of-the-art mobile game engines for Apple and Android devices as well as the web.

In this book you'll gain direct first-hand knowledge of how the mobile developer elite design, develop and deliver modern game engines while keeping abreast of the latest features offered by mobile devices. There is no abstracting or watering down of their experiences. You will read about what do, in their own words.

The interviews were designed to collect wisdom from game engine developers around the problems of working with and maintaining off-the-shelf mobile game engines, and you will agree that this objective was far exceeded. You will get a snapshot into the thoughts and processes from a diverse and successful collection of mobile game engine developers from around the world.

You will feel recharged and will be reinvigorated in your own game development efforts. The sage advice in these interviews will be useful in navigating, selecting and working with the tidal wave of promising mobile game engines available. Reading these interviews will help you find and best use the perfect engine for your mobile game and get it into the hands of an audience that loves it just as much as you.”


Features and Benefits

features interviews with mobile game engine developers
  • benefit from the insights from developers that are creating the bedrock of today's mobile gaming phenomenon
  • benefit from developers who created the infrastructure used by uncountable thousands of mobile games
  • benefit from inside information and industry anecdotes by the developers in their own words
  • benefit from lessons from developers with large and popular software projects
features insight into modern mobile game engines
  • benefit from deep knowledge into today's smart phones
  • benefit from tactics in managing the ever changing device capabilities and APIs
  • benefit from knowledge of what is important in modern game engine development and what is not
features all new interviews conducted in 2012
  • benefit from up-to-date information on devices, tools, and products in the market
  • benefit from inside information you won't read anywhere else
features developers with a broad level of experience
  • benefit from the wisdom of deeply experienced battle-hardened developers creating rock solid software
  • benefit from the excitement and exuberance of programmers telling the story of their first mobile game engine project
features the second in a series on mobile game engines
  • benefit from a interview process already proven to be successful
  • benefit from a step through the looking glass and a look at the other side of game development
 features game engines for iOS, Android and HTML5
  • benefit from the broad coverage of the most popular segments of the mobile market
  • benefit from the contrast of very different mobile platforms
features a digital ebook download
  • benefit from being able to download and read the book in minutes
  • benefit from the flexibility of a high-quality reading experience on the PC, mobile device and ereader.
  • benefit from the lower price that an ebook permits
features a paperback edition
  • benefit from the tactile reading experience that only a paperback can provide
  • benefit from the real-world satisfaction of adding the book to your personal library
features an author who is a developer a PhD in AI
  • benefit from an exhaustive investigation of a diverse hand-selected group of mobile game engines
  • benefit from a carefully prepared and high quality final product
  • benefit from well designed technical and process-oriented interview questions
  • benefit from the provocative questions that only a technical developer interviewer could ask
features commercial and open source projects
  • benefit from insight into how successful open source projects are structured and managed
  • benefit from a peek behind the curtain into the world of commercial game engine development and what it takes to compete


Buy the Paperback
Buy the eBook
  • Amazon Kindle store
  • Smashwords (Kindle, epub, PDF, RTF, TXT, etc.)
  • Apple iTunes (coming soon)
  • Barnes and Noble (coming soon)
  • Sony Reader Store (coming soon)


Interviewees

Features interviews with more than 15 mobile game engine developers:

  • Bill Hollings of cocos3d
  • Daniel Sperl of the Starling Framework
  • Francesco Cottone of Akihabara
  • Gabriel Jacobo of the Ignifuga Game Engine
  • Grzegorz Slazinski of the Esenthel Engine
  • Helge Forster of jPCT-AE
  • Ivan Pajuel oof ANGLE
  • Ka Wing Chin of Flixel Android
  • Mario Zechner of Libgdx
  • Matthew Thurley of Dwarf-fw
  • Nikolaus Gebhardt of CopperLicht
  • Robert Green of BatteryTech
  • Robert Rose of Bork 3D
  • Steffen Itterheim of Kobold2D
  • Travis Berthelot of AllBinary
  • Patrick Carson Meehan of Moai SDK
  • Diney Bomfim of NinevehGL
  • Michael Bayne of PlayN
  • Louis Stowasser of CraftyJS
  • Marco Di Benedetto of SpiderGL
  • Walter Luh of Corona SDK
  • Kirill Vainer of jMonkeyEngine


Sample Questions

Sample questions asked of mobile game engine developers in the book:

  • Why did you start working on this game engine?
  • What are some challenges in supporting multiple mobile platforms?
  • What is your approach for staying abreast of changes to the underlying technology and device APIs?
  • What are some game ideas you have had but do not have the time to work on?
  • How much revenue have you generated from your game engine?
  • What are some trends you are seeing in mobile gaming?


Technical Details
  • Title: Mobile Game Engines: Interviews with Mobile Game Engine Developers
  • Author: Jason Brownlee
  • Date: January 2012
  • Pages: 260 (paperback)
  • Words: 76,912 (approximate)
  • Formats: Paperback, Kindle, iTunes, PDF, etc.


About the Author

Jason Brownlee Jason Brownlee studied Applied Science at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia, going on to complete a Masters in Information Technology focusing on Niching Genetic Algorithms, and a PhD in the field of Artificial Immune Systems. Jason has worked for a number of years as a Consultant and Software Engineer for a range of Corporate and Government organizations. He has written about Artificial Intelligence algorithms which you can learn more about at CleverAlgorithms.com

In 2009 Jason started his first iPhone game project and before he could start he decided he had to choose an off-the-shelf game engine. This turned into a research project and he was required to manually gather the information from across the web. Not only did this take days - days he would much rather have been working on his game idea, but the results were limited. He created a list of candidate game engines, but had no idea which engine was good and which framework he should stay away from.

Later, born of the frustration from his first and failed mobile game project, Jason built a website to address this problem both for himself and for any other developer that just wants to get on with developing their game. The site is MobileGameEngines.com

Jason is always trying to think of new ideas to solve this problem better. If you have any ideas or just want to chat about mobile game engines, reach out to Jason via jasonb@MobileGameEngines.com



Spread the Word

Help to get the word out about this book by clicking Like, Tweeting, writing a blog post or writing a review of the book.





top