03/2015 OFFICIAL PARTNER OF DESIGN BUSINESS ART TECHNOLOGY THE NEXT GENERATION 03 OF MOBILE 4 197050406909 FREE2PLAY-ANALYSIS CASE STUDY NEVERWINTER LORDS OF THE FALLEN HOW BLIZZARD, POPCAP, UBISOFT HOW TO PORT AN ONLINE-RPG WHAT LEARNINGS DECK13 GAINED AND KING BIND THEIR PLAYERS. FROM PC TO CONSOLES. FROM CREATING A AAA-GAME. GDC EUROPE RETURNS AUGUST 3-4, 2015 READERS,USE CODE GDCE15MG TO SAVE AN ADDITIONAL 10% ON ALL ACCESS PASSES! SAVE 200€ WITH EARLY REGISTRATION BEFORE JULY 8! GDCEUROPE.COM Editorial Making Games 03/2015 THE FUTURE OF MOBILE? MOBILE IS THE FUTURE! t the beginning of March, what have a much broader »install base« than tra- seemed like the entire global ditional gaming platforms in these countries. Sebastian Weber games industry gathered in San Consequently, publishers will focus more and is Managing Editor of Making Games Magazin. Francisco for GDC in order to more on mobile games in the future in order exchange their knowledge and to reach these new target markets. They’re as- look out for any emerging in- suming to tap markets of potentially hundreds novationsA and trends. For the public, there was of millions of gamers after all. Many gamers one topic that dominated the conference: VR! suspect quick free2play rip offs in this area and Oculus presented its Rift, Sony introduced their turn their back on mobile gaming, but there latest version of Morpheus, and Steam inventor are plenty of examples which show that there Valve topped both competitors with SteamVR, are other ways, too: Daedalic, for example, are incited visitors and journalists to heaps of fully porting their adventure games from PC praise, and even made people from outside the to iPad (p. 12), Ubisoft is even working on a industry erupt in enthusiastic cheers. But one mobile game to be used for medical treatment trend that seemed to fly very much under the (p. 20), and a so-called »serious game« is to radar for most was the buzzword »emerging be used by teachers in the classroom to teach markets«. While core gamers threw themselves students about tolerance and moral courage »Publishers at »nerdy gadgets«, high-end graphics and AAA (p. 28). So the next generation of mobile games games, big publishers like Ubisoft or Warner – is probably set to take a big step forward, not focus more and more just like probably many others – were working only in terms of revenue for the publishers, but on mobile games meticulously on a master plan for how to best also in terms of relevance for the players – even in order to reach new tap into markets such as Latin America, Asia or though there will probably always be one black Russia. The problem is that in these countries sheep or the other. target markets.« consumers generally have less money than gamers in Germany, the UK, France or the US Enjoy the latest issue! and thus own less powerful hardware or even no PC or console at all. Your Making Games Team The final frontier Both said publishers have revealed the answer to this dilemma in a recent interview: Android smart phones and tablets in particular are relatively inexpensive these days and thus 3 Making Games 03/2015 FROM MOUSE TO FINGER ADVENTURE-PORTING FOR MOBILE DEVICES Daedalic Entertainment’s adventure experts are in the process of gradually porting their PC games one-to-one to mobile platforms and, while doing so, they had to learn that the effort of porting is often on a par with developing a game from scratch. Matthias Zorn or developers of video games, tab- »Living Stories« games »Das verlorene Herz« Senior Producer & let PCs have become increasingly (The Lost Heart) and »Das verlorene Lied« (The Localization Director important in the last few years, but Lost Song) as well as puzzle games to accompa- at Daedalic Entertainment with the growing number of de- ny the »Deponia« trilogy and the »Edna Bricht vices the pressure of competition Aus« (Edna & Harvey: The Breakout) series. in the market is growing as well. Mobile versions of »Deponia«, »The Whispered In 2014, an average of 500 new World« and »Fire« are eventually to follow this Matthias, who has a degree in mathematics, used to be editor-in-chief iOS games and 250 Android games were said summer as part of a series of games that are of the specialist gaming website Adventurecorner.de before he started F to have been published daily in the respective being ported for iOS, before Daedalic’s entire to work at Daedalic Entertainment in 2008 where he was a project app stores. Obviously, a lot of these releases go point&click adventure portfolio is gradually to lead and producer for titles such as »A New Beginning«, »Satinavs by the consumer unnoticed. These numbers be ported and released. Ketten« (Chains of Satinav) or »The Night of the Rabbit«. In May 2013 demonstrate how much harder it is to tell how he became Localization Director, supervising all of the Hamburg- Input modes: based developer’s localization jobs, and since mid-2014 he’s also successful mobile development is going to be been in charge of the mobile porting of their adventure portfolio. than it was only a few years ago. Individually or all-in-one? Apart from numerous new developments, It’s probably every developer’s dream to there are more and more releases of ported publish their games on as many platforms as games which were originally developed for possible in order to reach as many gamers as other platforms and now make a fresh start on possible. What has obviously to be taken into mobile devices. account is that not every game is suitable for A few years ago already, Daedalic Entertain- every platform. A turn-based strategy RPG like ment released their first adventure porting Daedalic’s »Blackguards« where a single fight »Edna Bricht Aus« (title of the English PC can last as long as 30 minutes and more is cer- version: Edna & Harvey: The Breakout) for iOS tainly less suitable for a mobile porting than in the app store. The release was followed by titles which can be interrupted more often and several mobile in-house developments like the be finished in shorter periods of time. 4 Daedalic’s first adventure port for iPad was »Edna Bricht Aus« (Edna & Harvey: The Breakout) From summer 2015, Daedalic’s entire adventure portfolio will gradually be which required a new interface and new controls compared to the PC version. published for iPad, starting with »The Whispered World«. In terms of the game controls it is also neces- »The Whispered World« or »A New Beginning«, sary during development to take the character- the porting required comprehensive adjust- istics of the respective platform into account: ments. While a PC game would obviously be played with mouse and keyboard, console games need Porting: to be controlled with a gamepad, while mobile External partner or do-it-yourself? devices require touchpad controls. That’s why it If a development studio is focused more on is advisable to consider early how the controls classic PC games rather than on mobile games and the corresponding interface should look as is the case with Daedalic Entertainment, like on different systems. It makes no sense they should thoroughly consider at the begin- trying to use the same controls on all systems – ning of production whether to do the port- controller, mouse, keyboard and touchpads are ing themselves or transferring the task to a simply too different. In many cases, controls partner. reduced to work on all systems would limit For Daedalic’s first few adventure portings the gameplay mechanics in a way that there this question was still easy to answer: The en- would hardly be anything left of the game. gine that was used wasn’t innately able to run It’s for this reason that we at Daedalic try to on mobile devices. Changes to the source code regard the controls for each system individu- couldn’t be made by our in-house studio, but ally and adjust them according to the given only by the engine developer, and all program- features. It’s particularly important for us that mers were already busy with other projects the game is fun to play on each target platform so that they couldn’t just spend a part of their and that the controls are intuitive. time on a project of such scale. Point&click adventures have the advantage Soon the decision was made to work with that the general type of game automatically external partners that were to port the games feels very natural using touchpad controls. to an engine capable for mobile – a step that Therefore, it’s not mandatory for a successful didn’t turn out to be ideal for us. port to feature major gameplay adjustments. Quite the contrary: Adventures have a more intuitive feeling to them on tablets than with mouse controls on PC. Yet, the porting process is, of course, no no-brainer that can be done on the fly. Apart from facing technical problems such as memory management and possibly limited hardware functions, we have to adjust the controls as well in order to emulate commands carried out with the right mouse button or keyboard on PC. Due to the limited screen size of tablet PCs, the developer has to make sure that all items and interactive areas in the game are presented large enough and have enough space between each other in order to be able to comfortably tap them with your finger. In most cases, it’s sufficient to keep these problems in mind when developing the PC ver- sion.