Building Real Mobile Games From Architecture Up
We teach the structural decisions that matter. Not surface-level tutorials or framework hype—but the design patterns, memory management, and system architecture that separate hobby projects from production-ready mobile games.
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How We Actually Teach This
Most courses throw code at you. We start with why the code exists and what problems it solves when you're running on a device with 2GB of RAM.
Architecture Before Code
You sketch system designs on paper first. Object pooling, entity systems, render pipelines—understand the structure before typing a single line. It's slower at the start, but you'll actually know what you're building.
Real Device Constraints
We profile on actual mid-range Android phones. If your game runs smooth on a flagship but stutters on a three-year-old device, that's a problem. You'll learn to measure frame time, memory allocation, and battery impact—not just make it work on your laptop.
Incremental Project Work
Each module adds one system to your game. Input handling, then physics, then rendering optimizations. By the end you have something playable and—more importantly—you understand every piece of it.
Problems You'll Actually Face
Memory Spikes Crashing Your Game
Your game runs fine for 10 minutes, then suddenly crashes. Android's garbage collector is fighting you, and you're creating 400 objects per frame without realizing it.
Object pooling patterns, allocation tracking, and how to structure game loops that don't anger the garbage collector. We measure allocations per frame and teach you to keep it under 16KB in hot paths.
Touch Input Feels Laggy
Players swipe but the character moves 100ms later. Your input handling runs on the wrong thread, or you're polling instead of reacting to events. It feels mushy and unresponsive.
Input architecture that responds within a single frame. Event systems, input buffering, and predictive movement that makes controls feel instant even when they're not.
Battery Drains in 30 Minutes
Your game looks great but phones get hot and battery life is terrible. You're redrawing the entire screen at 60fps even when nothing changes. Players uninstall before finishing the tutorial.
Dirty rectangle rendering, frame pacing strategies, and power profiling tools. We teach you to balance visual quality with thermal constraints—because phones throttle when they overheat.
What the Program Covers
This is a 9-month program starting October 2025. Not a weekend workshop. We meet twice weekly for live sessions plus project work on your own time.
Foundation Systems
Game loop architecture, state machines, input handling, basic physics integration. You build a simple prototype that runs at locked 60fps on a budget phone.
- Fixed timestep vs variable delta
- Component-based entity systems
- Touch gesture recognition
- Collision detection optimization
Rendering and Performance
Graphics pipeline, sprite batching, shader basics, memory management. Your game now has effects and animations without destroying frame rate.
- Draw call reduction techniques
- Texture atlas generation
- Particle system architecture
- Profiling and optimization workflow
Production Concerns
Save systems, analytics integration, multi-resolution support, build pipelines. The unglamorous stuff that makes a game shippable.
- Serialization strategies
- Resolution-independent UI layout
- Platform-specific optimizations
- Automated testing for mobile
Who Teaches This
We don't hire contractors to read slides. Instruction comes from people who've shipped games and dealt with the consequences of bad architecture decisions.
Callum Brennagh
Spent six years at a mobile studio in Toronto before moving to teaching. Worked on three titles that hit 10M+ downloads—and two that never launched because the architecture couldn't scale.
He's not interested in teaching the latest framework trends. His focus is on fundamentals that'll still matter in five years: memory layouts, cache coherency, how mobile GPUs actually work. You'll spend more time with profiling tools than you expect.
Outside of class, he runs code review sessions where students bring their messiest systems and we refactor them together. It's uncomfortable but useful—you learn more from fixing bad code than writing perfect code from scratch.
Technical Focus Areas
- Mobile GPU optimization
- Game loop architecture
- Memory profiling
- Physics integration
- Build system design
- Cross-platform rendering