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Best Practices
in Game Design for
the Ultra-Mobile PC 

by Matt Gillespie, Michael Finkel
and Victoria Bailey 

Summary of Contents for UMPC

Page 1: ...Best Practices in Game Design for the Ultra Mobile PC by Matt Gillespie Michael Finkel and Victoria Bailey ...

Page 2: ...cific game design factors that contribute to the best user experience The analysis includes design considerations for providing high quality games on the UMPC as well as common issues associated with providing UMPC support providing best practices to resolve each of those issues 2 Screen Size Considerations Because the UMPC screen is much smaller than a traditional screen the size of graphical ele...

Page 3: ...used in the standard PC version As shown in Figure 1 this issue is particularly acute when multiple buttons or other elements are clustered together which makes it more likely that the user will select a different element than the one they intend Even when it is possible to select the correct element with some care this issue can significantly detract from the user experience Figure 1 On a 20 inch...

Page 4: ...hey develop game interfaces for the UMPC scaling the entire game window to fit on the screen or rearranging the interface to take full advantage of the wide screen area Certain simple accommodations can make games more playable even in a truncated state For example providing scrollbars and allowing the window to be resized manually or automatically may be sufficient in some cases to allow the user...

Page 5: ...n full screen mode at a lower resolution than the physical screen the game display may appear centered with space on either side as in the case of a 640x480 window being centered on a 800x480 screen or an 800x600 window being centered on a 1024x600 screen with black bars on each side mismapping may occur between the two with the entire touch screen surface being mapped to the relatively small disp...

Page 6: ...le Another solution is for developers to natively support the 800x480 and 1024x600 screen resolutions as a user configurable option In some cases it might be possible for the game to automatically stretch the window to fit the full screen if the resulting dimensional distortion of game elements is acceptable 3 3 Alternatives to Hover Over Effects Issue Many games use a hover over feature that enab...

Page 7: ...eir designs which causes the limitations associated with the form factor to vary by device That variability typically requires developers to focus on the lowest common denominator of hardware features when designing games in terms of core requirements 4 1 CD ROM Drive Issue CDs are currently the most popular method for distributing games In addition to being installed from a CD the disk is often r...

Page 8: ...g characters creating profiles saving games or supporting a chat feature for online games It is common for games to require a keyboard for example to enter a profile name at the beginning of a gaming session but not to require the use of a keyboard at any other time during the session Some games also require players to use the keyboard to name their saved games In many cases the on screen keyboard...

Page 9: ...ftware provider 6 Additional Resources Game developers and architects who are considering how best to integrate the needs of the UMPC platform into their offerings will benefit from the following resources Intel Software Network Mobile Developer Community is a hub for developer information related to all things mobile including technical documentation SDKs forums knowledgebases and blogs http www ...

Page 10: ...st Intel NetMerge Intel NetStructure Intel SingleDriver Intel SpeedStep Intel StrataFlash Intel Viiv Intel XScale IPLink Itanium Itanium Inside MCS MMX MMX logo Optimizer logo OverDrive Paragon PDCharm Pentium Pentium II Xeon Pentium III Xeon Performance at Your Command Pentium Inside skoool Sound Mark The Computer Inside The Journey Inside VTune Xeon Xeon Inside and Xircom are trademarks or regis...

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