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.

Successfully Navigate the Evolving World of Mobile and Social Game Design and Monetization Completely updated, Mobile & Social Game Design: Monetization Methods and Mechanics, Second Edition explains how to use the interconnectedness of social networks to make "stickier," more compelling games on all types of devices. Through the book’s many design and marketing techniques, strategies, and examples, you will acquire a better understanding of the design and monetization mechanics of mobile and social games as well as working knowledge of industry practices and terminology. Learn How to Attract—and Retain—Gamers and Make Money The book explores how the gaming sector has changed, including the evolution of free-to-play games on mobile and tablet devices, sophisticated subscription model-based products, and games for social media websites, such as Facebook. It also demystifies the alphabet soup of industry terms that have sprouted up around mobile and social game design and monetization. A major focus of the book is on popular mechanisms for acquiring users and methods of monetizing users. The author explains how to put the right kinds of hooks in your games, gather the appropriate metrics, and evaluate that information to increase the game’s overall stickiness and revenue per user. He also discusses the sale of virtual goods and the types of currency used in games, including single and dual currency models. Each chapter includes an interview with industry leaders who share their insight on designing and producing games, analyzing metrics, and much more.

Metagames: Games about Games scrutinizes how various meta devices, such as breaking the fourth wall and unreliable narrator, change and adapt when translated into the uniquely interactive medium of digital games. Through its theoretical analyses and case studies, the book shows how metafictional experimentation can be used to both challenge and push the boundaries of what a game is and what a player’s role is in play, and to raise more profound topics such as those describing experiences of people of oppressed identities. The book is divided into six chapters that deal with the following meta devices: breaking the fourth wall, hypermediation, unreliable narrator, abusive game design, fragmentation, and parody. The book will predominantly interest scholars and students of media studies and game studies as it continues discourses held in the discipline regarding the metareferential character of digital games.

with tunes, singing rhymes and methods of playing according to the variants extant and recorded in different parts of the Kingdom

The Game Boy Advance platform as computational system and cultural artifact, from its 2001 release through hacks, mods, emulations, homebrew afterlives. In 2002, Nintendo of America launched an international marketing campaign for the Game Boy Advance that revolved around the slogan “Who Are You?”—asking potential buyers which Nintendo character, game, or even device they identified with and attempting to sell a new product by exploiting players' nostalgic connections to earlier ones. Today, nearly two decades after its release, and despite the development of newer and more powerful systems, Nintendo's Game Boy Advance lives on, through a community that continues to hack, modify, emulate, make, break, remake, redesign, trade, use, love, and play with the platform. In this book Alex Custodio traces the network of hardware and software afterlives of the Game Boy Advance platform. Each chapter considers a component of this network—hardware, software, peripheral, or practice—that illuminates the platform's unique features as a computational system and a cultural artifact. Examining the evolution of the design and architecture of Nintendo's handhelds and home consoles, and the constraints imposed on developers and players, for example, Custodio finds that Nintendo essentially embeds nostalgia into its hardware. She explores Nintendo's expansion of the platform through interoperability; physical and affective engagement with the Game Boy Advance; portability, private space, and social interaction; the platformization of nostalgia; fan-generated content including homebrew, hacking, and hardware modding; and e-waste—the final afterlife of consumer electronics. Although the Game Boy Advance is neither the most powerful nor the most popular of Nintendo's handhelds, Custodio argues, it is the platform that most fundamentally embodies Nintendo's reliance on the aesthetics and materiality of nostalgia.