For U & Me
Career
Will a Career in Mobile Game Development be a Good Option? The mobile gaming industry in India seems poised to grow at an unprecedented pace this year. Will this prove to be a huge job market for those who are interested in games development?
T
he expanding smartphone user base in India has fuelled the growth of the mobile games as well as applications markets—both of which are expected to be major revenue generators in the days to come. According to various studies, the number of smartphone users in India is expected to grow to 67 million this year and 382 million by 2016. In the process, the mobile gaming market will touch Rs 27 billion by 2016. So this is probably the best time to get into the games development groove and let the geek in you out of the closet. Let’s find out if a career in this arena can fetch rich dividends.
Mobile versus PC/console games development
According to a survey conducted by the Game Developers Conference held in San Francisco this year, smartphones and tablets are what most developers are working on, with 55 per cent of respondents currently creating games for these platforms. So the next logical question would be-what differentiates mobile games development from the traditional PC or console games development? Rohit Bhosle, who works as a games programmer at the Walt Disney Company has quite a few games to his credit. “It is a cyclic phase. Initially, it was difficult to make games 82 | april 2014 | OPEN SOURCE For You | www.OpenSourceForU.com
for the PC, as the hardware was very limited. Now, that is not the case for PCs but for mobile gaming, developers are again constrained by huge limitations in hardware. Though, eventually, even that will change,” he says. Swagata Acharrya, who works as an Android developer at Simpragma, a company that develops mobile and tablet solutions for its clients, feels one of the main differences will be the form factor and the limitations that the mobile hardware imposes. “For instance, I cannot have a game that takes up too much of memory, because at the end of the day, my device’s memory is limited. Also, the app has to take into consideration the times when the user is doing something else. What I mean is, we should not do something in the background that takes up a lot of resources. Mobile games also have to factor in fat fingers. Not all screens are the same, not all fingers are of equal thickness, nor do all devices have the same memory. It is even more complicated working with Android, as there are literally unlimited form factors. So the mobile UI has to be optimised for mobile use. The UX can be a luxury in PC or console games, but for mobiles, it is an absolute must. Building a game is one thing, while building games for mobiles obviously comes with certain restrictions,” explains Swagata.
