More than just code

Chances are, when you first start out as a mobile game developer you’ll quickly realise there’s a lot more to a game than just code. It seems obvious, but you forget that all the extra components like graphics, fonts, leaderboards, music and sound effects that go into make a polished product can easily take longer to put together than the actual code.

Thankfully you don’t need to reinvent the wheel and there are a lot of great resources out there already. Daniel Spruce over at Escape Development has put together a great list of free developer resources that you can check out here:


http://escapedevelopment.blogspot.com/2011/12/free-developer-resources.html


While I generally always do my own graphics and art, I’ll freely admit I’m hopeless at music and developing your own sounds effects just isn’t practical. I’ve used almost all the resources on this great list.

One resource in particular I’d like to highlight is Font Squirrel.


http://www.fontsquirrel.com/


The difference between using an appropriate, quality font in your game and using the default font is massive. And in terms of effort it’s one of the simplest and easiest ways to make your game look professional. I didn’t use special fonts in my first game Eclipse since I was worried about font licensing but now that I’ve found a quality set of free fonts I’d never use standard font again (unless I was creating a Metro UI of course!).