According to a recent research done by Juniper (A Market intelligence firm) “mobile devices and tablets will become the dominant gaming device by 2016. North American, Far East and Chinese markets will contribute the maximum in-game purchases done by the users”.

iOS has an edge over Android in the North American market whereas Android dominates the Chinese market in terms of revenue. This makes it all the more important to build a cross platform game.

Game development involves 2 parts namely

1. Developing User Interface and Business Logic
2. Backend Logic

There are various tools for the former like Cocos2D, AndEngine, Unity 3d etc. available in the market. These game engines will help you to develop the User Interface and the Business Logic. For the Backend, you can either create your own logic or use the readymade Backend APIs available in the market.

Game developers have the luxury of leaving the backend logic to service providers who provide them as APIs and concentrate on user interface and gameplay. Games can be made engaging for the users by adding a few basic features such as social connectivity, leaderboards, top scorers etc.

Some of the features these APIs provide are

• Simple scoring APIs to persist your user scores on the cloud. Leaderboards to show the top scorers. You can also customize it to show daily and weekly leaderboards.
• Integrate with your social API to show top scorers based on users buddy list. You can also allow the users to challenge their peers, post on their walls etc.
• Provide complete reward management for your games. Collectable rewards like virtual currencies and discount offers are known to increase your game’s active game play time.
• Integrate with Push Notifications and Geospatial APIs to provide updates to users based on their locations. Use push notifications when your App is in the background.
• Integrate with the Review/Rating API to provide user based reviews for your games.
• You can store files and let your users access it with a simple integration with the File Storage API. You can also allow the users store files and share it among their friends.

With these features, you are all set to make your own Angry Birds or Temple Run. No need to worry about the various platforms as all of these backend services are for cross platform development. You can concentrate on building your gameplay by reducing the various backend complexities.