It's sometimes difficult to remember the time before the current wave of smartphones, before iOS and Android, before we kept more computing power in our shirt pocket than it took to land on the Moon. But there was a sliver of time before the launch of the iPhone in the Summer of 2007 when mobile devices were able to play games, but hadn't yet reached the maturity of modern day phones. You may remember "flip phone" devices, or even the first and second generation N-Gage.
It's not a taco.
This is where I first cut my teeth on mobile game development, in 2005 on a series of Warner Brothers mobile games for Symbian and J2ME phones. Even though PC and console games were becoming fairly mature and complex at that point, we worked in a medium that still required us to create pixel art with aggressively restrictive color limitations, extremely choppy frame-based animation, and work within unthinkably small screen resolutions. The smallest screen I designed games for was the Symbian Series 40 operating system, which had a 95 x 65 pixel display. Smaller than some of the icons on my desktop today! And we did this not so we could emulate a retro aesthetic, but because it was all you could fit on these devices. Control schemes even had to take into consideration that only a single button press could register at a time! It was a world of squeezing the most out of a very limited device.
Batman Begins Mobile on the Symbian Series 60 operating system.
Harry Potter: Wizard Duel on the Symbian Series 60 operating system.
During this period I worked on the mobile game for Batman Begins, a Harry Potter themed turn-based fighting game called Wizard Duel, and some Looney Tunes-themed puzzle games.
We stayed within our limitations in a number of ways. We built tileable swatches for the backgrounds and flipped and rotated these reusable assets when we could:
We lowered our number of colors in our palettes, then lowered them again. Removed frames of animation over and over to reduce the footprint and memory requirements of the final product. Take a look at the complete in-game art assets for Batman Begins Mobile:
This is about 232 kilobytes on disk before atlasing and compressing! The entire downloadable install file for a 2-hour game with five distinct levels was 186 kilobytes. A far cry from 100 megabyte limitation on the App Store today. Most animations only contained just two or three frames:
Flip phone particle effects. Yep.
In a way, this was one of the most challenging set of projects I've worked on. As 3D gaming was becoming more and more sophisticated, we were all racing to stay on top of the technology curve. It's easy to forget that not too long ago devices such as these were still working under relatively great restrictions. The daily process of trying to fit more into less space was an exercise in efficiency and strategy. My experiences on this platform definitely enhanced my overall game development skills, and I recommend to anyone in game development that they spend time contemplating game creation with drastically different limitations.