Feature: 'Mobile Postmortem: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure'

In today's main feature article (free reg. req.), Phil Marley of Kuju Entertainment recalls the plateaus and pitfalls of making this "most excellent" mobile phone game Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, starring the time-spanning hijinks of Bill S. Preston and Ted "Theodore" Logan. Marley explains the rationale behind the games' initial design in his introduction: "We couldn't ignore the more mass-market audience, of course. Therefore we wanted to create a game that would appeal to everyone, whether they'd heard of the movies or not. A 2D, Zelda-style arcade adventure/puzzler seemed a good match. For one thing, slower-paced games tend to be a safer bet when developing for a large range of handsets (we try to cover as many of the mass-market handsets as possible. In this case, that meant 35 phones!) Many of these handsets have joysticks or d-pads that aren't ideally suited to games, while limitations such as no simultaneous keypresses (run and jump, for example) can make even simple action tricky." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject (free registration required.)