It’s fair to note that being a game developer involves a lot more than just the things you’ll be taught during a CS major. But the same is true for any sort of developer: web developers, embedded systems, geographic info systems, mathematical modelling, finance, scientific applications, radar analysis and any kind of start-up (to namecheck the kinds of roles I’ve dabbled in through my software career.)

Nobody would have taken me seriously if I’d applied for roles as a developer of geographic software without a CS degree. This isn’t just a matter of perception. I would have been a rubbish geographic software developer without it. The same is true of games developers. It’s possibly to produce a few games with entirely self-taught skills, but the range and depth of what you’re capable of will be nowhere near as large as if you do the major.

Before you think I’m being elitist and dismissing other people to make myself look clever, consider this: I don’t actually have the much-vaunted CS degree (I did electronics) and now, twenty years later, I regret that decision because I was a rubbish geographic information systems developer, who achieved nothing of note during that part of my career. Obviously by now I’ve read and studied and self-taught myself everything that I missed during my undergrad, and plenty more, but in the meantime, the best of my peers have been building on top of their undergraduate studies, instead of consolidating them like me.

Learn from my mistake. If you want to be the best game developer you can be, then challenge and stretch yourself. There are many axes along which to do it, and a CS degree is one of the most challenging, aimed squarely at one of the hardest part of a game developer’s required skillset, and hence is one of the most rewarding things you could do.

However, your movement capabilities are still within a finite distance from that origin point, which means that people with less minute precision control will have a more difficult time playing these games by default. They will have trouble smoothly using the virtual stick within a physical area roughly half the size of physical analog sticks on, say, Xbox or PS controllers. Many games allow you to adjust your stick sensitivity settings, but for a mobile device with a control area roughly half an inch in size with no physical feedback, such settings wouldn’t result in much noticeable change.

Apple – for right or wrong – has gone a long way to add a note of negativity to the public perception of Flash. This has long been the case for websites and their creators, where things such as searchability, accessibility, etc. have been deemed of higher importance than the extra interactivity that Flash can bring. With HTML5 technologies coming into wider use, Flash has become almost non-existent for website use.

Games are a totally different story. HTML5 has the potential to match Flash for performance and capability, but the core frameworks and (perhaps most importantly) the toolsets don’t really exist in any sort of optimized format yet. Flash is still the easiest and best option for web-based gaming but that could change in the not-too-distant future.

However, the money just doesn’t seem to be there for web-based games vs. mobile apps / XBLA / Steam / etc unless you can make a big impact with a Facebook offering or an exclusive game for a large portal like PopCap or Big Fish.