Game Design

Because of the inherent limitations to developing for Flash Lite and mobile devices, many of the conventions and best practices for developing Flash content for the desktop player do not apply. The lower CPU speed and memory overhead of the U10 device require a simplified approach to animating the objects in the game and detecting collisions. Additionally, the simple four-way navigation of the device lacks an Enter key, so menu systems and game controls that require the user to select something have to be designed around this limitation.

When I prototyped the game, I had to design around these limitations. Because the game control would be limited to only four input events, a classic action arcade game with only Left, Right, and Fire controls was ideal. I chose a retro space shooter game in the vein of Space Invaders and Galaga, where the player would need only to steer the ship left or right and fire at enemies.

While prototyping the player and enemy ship movement, I found that smooth animations for the player ship across the bottom of the screen and enemy ships down the front of the screen slowed the game considerably. Once I added the player ship's weapon and started trying to detect collisions using pixel coordinates, the prototype became almost unplayable. To deal with this, I created a simplified system of seven fixed vertical lanes in which the player and enemy ships could travel (see Figure 5).

Figure 5. Seven fixed lanes of game play

This way the player's ship wouldn't have to be animated continuously across the bottom of the screen, and only seven points would have to be checked for collision. In other words, if an enemy ship and the player ship are in the same lane and the player fires the weapon, you know there is a collision.

The menu design is adapted from the U10 device's menu interface for the device, which is perfect for its control input (that is, no Enter or Select key). The user scrolls through a vertical list of menu items, using a <Left> or <Right> keypress, to select items and to drill down into the menu.

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