Game design can be defined as the art of applying design and aesthetics to create a game to facilitate interaction between players for entertainment or experimental purposes. It enables to create goals, rules, and challenges to define a game or simulation that produces desirable interactions among its participants.
I have been of the opinion that a developer needs to be comfortable in developing games without keeping the platform in mind. Everyone has their own unique method of expressing emotions and games can be used as one of the mediums to do exactly that. We are making Asura on PC because we primarily play and have been playing games on PC platform. Moreover, the design of Asura best fits a PC platform hence the decision to forge the game on PCs. What I would suggest any developer is to not make their games on the basis of platforms; instead choose a platform based on the design of their game.
There has also been a trend of looking at the business side of things and making (read cloning) your games based on that. I think it is one of the most harmful and uninspiring ways to develop games. Instead, I recommend you come up with a prototype and decide on which platform it will work the best. Make games to express your design and success, Inshallah it will follow through…The whole point is to forge epic stuff and have tons of fun with it and that is what we are doing at Ogre Head!
Take Subway Surfer for example, it has a game-play and design which fits well with the controls of a phone but if you try to take the same design and apply it on PC, it just won’t work. The depth of the game just won’t satisfy a person who plays on a PC and the controls won’t be as fun and twitchy when compared to the touch screen of a mobile device which is how it is intended to be played.
A Street Fighter game always works with an arcade stick because that is how it has been designed. If you play it on a touch screen or any mobile there is huge chance that it just wouldn’t do justice to the game and it would feel wonky. Thinking of porting or cloning a Street Fighter game into mobile would be like jumping onto a speeding train. This is because Street Fighter uses 6 button controls and a joystick, which if replicated in a mobile device would take up/cover the whole screen and it will be very hard for players to pull off the moves which is where the meat of the game is.
On the other hand let’s look at XCOM. Although it has some memory issues on iPad, the developer Firaxis realized that since the game is tactical and twitch based, it could work best for touch devices hence the game-play is fun even in handhelds even though it is a pretty hardcore PC game. The game-play experience is almost same when compared to its PC counterpart in my humble opinion.
In conclusion, I would suggest developing games for platforms where you think your game design will be best realised instead of shoe-horning it into every platform just to milk the market. My final advice to developers would be to consider the type of game they’re making, and target the platform that best suits it. The Indian game development scene at the moment is still very much at a nascent stage and there are a handfull of studios who are doing honest and epic work and for them we wish all the best!
(These are purely personal views of Orge Head Studio, C0-Founder & Director, Zainuddin Fahad and AnimationXpress.com does not necessarily subscribe to these views)