Before you jump in and start creating, you need to decide on your game’s genre and how it might play. Then, it’s time for prototyping. In this experimental phase of mobile game design, the goal is to identify your core gameplay loop. Be ready to fail fast and move on so you can refine your idea, find the fun, and begin more focused development to bring your game to life.

Unity’s mobile game engine has many tools to help with preproduction, regardless of your programming skill. Create code-free scripting logic with node-based scripting, and start designing, prototyping, and playtesting levels in your mobile game with ProBuilder. The Unity Asset Store has thousands of prebuilt 3D assets and code modules to help with prototyping. If you get stuck, visit our documentation pages, or lean on Unity’s supportive community.

Once you’ve created a prototype that feels fun to play, it’s time to start adding visual polish and optimizing your game for different devices. It’s important to strike a balance between visual quality and performance. Distinctive visuals help games stand out among the thousands of other mobile titles released each year, but they also have to be optimized for different pieces of hardware. 

The majority of mobile games – and 75% of top-grossing ones – find this balance by using 2D graphics, since they look great and can require less computing power. Unity’s mobile game engine can support you with a battle-tested 2D toolkit that handles everything from animation to physics to lighting. The Universal Render Pipeline (URP) can help you create higher-end visuals that won’t compromise on performance across a range of devices.

A mobile game engine will help you build a polished game, but it can’t help you grow your audience. The good news? Unity has more to offer than just our game engine. Whether you launch your game as a premium app or set up in-app purchases, services like Unity Ads can help you scale your business so you’re well positioned to continue delivering content updates and launching great mobile games for years to come.  

Remember, mobile game development doesn’t stop at launch. Today’s gamers expect games as a service, with a steady stream of updates, balance changes, and seasonal events to keep the experience fresh. Unity Gaming Services can help you manage your LiveOps strategy with services for multiplayer, managing player data, analytics, and more.