Swipe This!: The Guide to Great Touchscreen Game Design

I have a Computer Science Bachelor degree and am the CEO and Founder of a small start up founded 6 months back in Chandigarh, India. We wanted to start creating games for touch enabled smartphones and tablets and this book helped a lot as it had 4 awesome features in it:-1) Post Mortems of many successful touch screen games2) Developer Interviews with many talented and famous iOS and Android developers.3) Links to external GDCVault talks and many other interesting articles.4) Fresh, exciting funny writing style of the author.What this book contains?Advice, tips, hints and analysis of how to go about designing touch screen games and why some games are more popular than others presented in a fun and fresh way so that the reader does not doze off while reading. The author goes into sufficient detail and there is enough information here to get you started on your own mobile game adventure :)What this book is not aimed for?This book does teach you how to program or how to create art for your touch screen games, it focuses only on the designing of the games!Overall! A must buy for any one who is thinking of designing/developing games for today's modern touch screen enabled smartphones and tablets! :)

I understand some people think this book is incomplete or pointlessbecause you can't develop a game with this book.But I believe this book is still a MUST read for game designers ESPECIALLY console designers who started to think about developing a game for smartphones or tablets.The author Scott Rogers was a great game designer/creator for consoles and HE KNOWS how console designers think.The way Scott thinks about what makes great games, which game genres you should pick, or whatever... is the way a great console game designer thinks.To me, it was really easy to read, understand, and follow.If you are wondering which way to go next,a big project AAA console title or an independent small project iPhone app,then this is the book for you.After you read chapter 11, the final chapter, you'll make up your mind.(At least I made up my mind.)

My first exposure to Scott & his stories was at a GDC - Game Developer's conference. His topic was "everything I learned about gaming, I learned at Disneyland". It was wonderful. Since then I have read his blog, his first book - Level Up, and now his second book, Swipe This.Particularly funny title for me as I grew up when Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book" was first published in the 70s.I paid for my copy of Swipe This! because it is quite good and useful, and I want Scott to write more.If you are interested in learning, and also being entertained while you read about tablet and phone based games and apps, then this book is for you. Good for teachers, students, journalists, and people wanting to break into or improve upon their positions in the game and app creation world. Write more, Scott!

Highly recommend this to anyone looking to design a mobile game!I'm a veteran software engineer/programmer recently contracted to create a mobile game. Since I haven't made a game since first learning the art of code (in the days of monochrome monitors) a refresher course was needed. This book really does a good job of getting you in the mindset of the mobile gaming world, which has many distinct differences from the console/PC environment.It's not technical in the least... A welcome break from my usual books full of code samples and algorithms! If you're looking to get an edge on the overall design side of things this is an excellent read. Clear, concise, informative, and entertaining. Now back to the gritty stuff!

Scott Rogers is always a good bet for insightful, practical advice on game development. Both this and his first book, Level Up! are consistently entertaining for any game enthusiast, and educational for those hoping to pursue game development as a career. Full disclosure: I've worked with Scott and lived to tell about it.

"Swipe This!" is a must read for anyone interested in touchscreen game design. Anyone from seasoned game developers, game design students, or those just interested in learning more about what makes their mobile and touch-screen games so fun will be benefited by this book. It's a fun read that presents valuable content in easily digestible chunks (in a way that is more appealing than that sounds). Definitely worth your time!

This book really takes the cake when it comes to mobile game design. It's a perfect buy for both camps - those looking to ride that wave into this exploding market AND those of us that are more experienced in mobile game design. Swipe This! offers excellent, practical insight into the next stage of our understanding of game design. Do NOT pass up on this book. It's fantastic!

I acquired this book expecting a how-to, hands-on guide for actual or aspiring game designers. What I got instead was a very general, rather pedestrian commentary on how great games and game design is. There are some useful bits of real and practical info scattered throughout what is basically a work of boosterism and cheer-leading for the idea of gaming and game design; but only a few bits. This book might be a useful gift to very young enthusiasts of gaming as a way of getting young gamers to begin thinking of games and game design on a more sophisticated level, as intellectual puzzles and challenges that can develop their mental skills and as potential career fields, not just as consumer products and idle distractions. Its chatty, simple prose and repetitiveness makes it ideal for that type of reader. Parents with kids who are big gamers can use it as a hook for expanding that interest into broader channels and activities. Adults interested in trying their hand at game-design, however, will find very little practical direction from this "guide."

Have no idea why this book has been rated below a 5 star! A must buy for students and games designers!

I pushed through half the book and then gave up.You may (or may not) like the author's style but apart from a long list of (old fashioned) games and their gameplay style, I didn't find anything interesting, nor did I learn anything.

The book is written by professional and a good man. You'll feel it from the very beginning.Nothing extra, just important information. Gives everything you need to understand how game design should be done and does that with great sense of humour. I really enjoyed. Thank you Scott!

It's quite important to note that this isn't a book about coding games for touchscreens - it's about designing games, figuring out what approach will work best, which features it needs and how to turn that great idea you had for a game into something people will actually be able to play, maybe even creating the next hit game. The book begins with the basics, a quick rundown of the range of devices available and the capabilities they have but quickly moves into the real substance of game design. Using real game examples, referencing actual games you can download and try for yourself, the book breaks down the different approaches to structure, narrative and characterisation that can be applied to touchscreen gaming.It quickly becomes clear that touchscreen gaming needs a fresh approach because many of the paradigms from computer or console games just don't work on touchscreen devices - so if you're an old gaming dog, be prepared to learn some new tricks. The book is peppered with short interviews with working games developers in between the chapters on the main game genres, like physics-driven games, action games, puzzle games etc. If that all sounds a bit dry it isn't - Scott Rogers has a chatty, approachable style and the book's lavishly illustrated throughout with cartoon-style graphics and enough corny jokes to keep you turning the page. The best thing is that it leaves would-be game designers in no doubt about the work that's involved in conceiving and designing a great game - without actually putting you off before you've even begun.

This book is a thorough primer on the business of designing games for touchscreen devices. It covers every aspect of the process, from ideas to user interfaces, to costs, coding, marketing, selling and supporting the final product. The cover suggests that it focusses on iPad, but it deals with every kind of touchscreen device, from Nintendo DS to Playstation Vita, iPod Touch, iPad, IOS, Symbian, Android, and even graphics tablets.The author certainly has the professional and academic credentials, and he has put together an essential book for anyone thinking about developing games for touchscreen devices. The "Class of 2008" is a worrying title for a chapter in such a fast-moving industry, and perhaps says something about the likely useful lifespan of this book. For example, it does not mention recently announced consoles and phones, and does not mention the new iPad Mini.It's a great book but, for a book about a business so heavily involved with cool graphics, the book's graphics are a complete disaster. The so-called illustrations are incredibly poor - just bits of amateurish scribble that make the book look like a school project. The cartoons (and there are many) feature weak-as-water witticisms that aren't worth the bother. Omitting them could have knocked a good 100 pages off the book. The text is also a comedian's graveyard of feeble quips so distinctly American that they are probably irrelevant to any non-American.If you can stomach the diabolical graphics and the humourless humour, this book is an essential tool that will certainly steer you away from many of the costly pitfalls in this sector of the games market.