How to make a mobile game

Mobile games compete with notifications, messages and every other app on the phone. That's why the hits are quick to start and quick to put down: a run in an endless runner, a level of a puzzle game, a round of an .io game. Your game should be playable within seconds of opening it, save automatically, and make sense with the sound off, since many people play muted.

Controls are the biggest design problem. Virtual joysticks and lots of buttons feel bad on glass. Most successful mobile games build the whole game around one gesture: tap to jump, swipe to change lanes, drag to aim and release. Start there and only add a second control if the game truly needs it.

Most mobile games are free and earn from ads, in-app purchases or both. Rewarded ads (watch a video for a bonus) are the friendliest to players. A one-time paid game is simpler but harder to sell on phones. Whatever you pick, design it in from the start, because bolting a shop onto a finished game rarely works. If this is your first game, it's fine to skip monetisation entirely and treat the release as practice.

Phones run browser games well now. A web game opens from a link, needs no install and no review, and works on iPhone and Android at once. You lose the store listing and some native features, but for sharing a game with friends, a class or a community, a link is far easier than an app. Web engines like Phaser, PixiJS and three.js are built for this, and portals like CrazyGames and Poki publish browser games that people play on phones every day.

Text that's too small. A font that reads fine on a monitor is unreadable at arm's length on a phone. Test every screen on the smallest phone you can borrow, and keep anything important large and high-contrast.

Ignoring the notch and the home bar. Modern phones cut into the screen at the top and reserve a strip at the bottom. Engines expose a safe area; keep buttons and the score inside it, or players will tap the system instead of your game.

A long first minute. Splash screens, logins, a story, a tutorial: every step before the fun loses players. The best mobile games are playing within five seconds of opening. Teach by doing, with the first level as the tutorial.

Draining the battery. A game that runs at full speed on a menu, or keeps rendering in the background, gets uninstalled. Cap the frame rate where you can, pause when the app leaves the screen, and watch how warm the phone gets after ten minutes.

Skipping haptics. A short vibration on a hit, a pickup or a win makes a touch game feel physical in a way sound alone doesn't, and most players keep the sound off. Engines expose the phone's vibration; use light taps for small moments and a stronger one for big ones, and let players turn it off.

Modder builds browser games from a description. You type the idea, and an agent writes the game, adds art and sound, plays it in a browser to find bugs and fixes them, usually in five to twenty-five minutes. Published games get their own page that opens on a phone's browser with touch controls as a fallback.

Be aware that Modder's web maker designs games for a computer first, with keyboard and mouse. Simple one-gesture games (tap, swipe, drag) adapt well to phones; games that need many keys don't. Modder doesn't publish to the App Store or Google Play. If you need a store app, use an engine from the steps above; if you need a game on phones by tonight, describe it in the box on our maker pages.