Device Limitations

There are various limitations faced in developing games for the mobile phones. Generally, they fall under the following factors:

• Screen Resolutions
• Colors and Sound
• File Size
• Latency

Screen Resolution

While screen resolution (dots-per-inch) continues to improve and color screens are becoming the norm, screen sizes are likely to remain small because people don’t like clunky phones. Therefore,the user interface design layout and the gaming environment will have to plan and design within the vicinity of a small screen size.

Colors & Sound

Most phones in consumers’ hands are still black and white, although most Java-enabled or Flash Lite-enabled phones on the market today support color. Twelve-bit color is fairly common among such phones. Even though phones are inherently sound devices, applications have a limited ability to play sounds. The J2ME specification doesn't’t require hardware manufacturers to support sound at all, although even primitive Java phones allow the use of some sounds, and MIDI support is increasingly standard. Generally, only one voice and one channel are possible.

File Size

Most Java-enabled or Flash Lite-enabled mobile phones have a limited amount of memory. The actual limit depends on the handset, or memory cards and (sometimes) the carrier’s policies. Designing a compelling game to such tight limits is a challenge, but remember that the first home computers had 64 KB or less, and some people still rave about their games. Limits are much less tight for smart phones which can even run multi-megabyte applications.

Latency

Latency is a continuing problem for games on mobile phones, and developers expend considerable effort dealing with the issues it raises. This makes it effectively impossible to develop fast-action multi player mobile games. Turn-based multi player games are quite feasible. We will discuss other ways of dealing with the problem later. While the carriers are working to expand the amount of bandwidth available to mobile phones, they have not made latency reduction a priority, as it is less important for virtually every other kind of application. Hence this is not a problem that will go away. There is one exception to this rule: phones that include Blue tooth or other wireless LAN technologies can communicate with other nearby Blue tooth devices at Internet latencies (200-400 milliseconds, typically).

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