To dual, or not to dual…
After watching both parts of the very informative WWDC ‘10 sessions on Game Design and Development, I was very interested to hear their take on control methods on iOS. As is discussed throughout the session, the developers started out using a virtual joystick to move the character. However, they soon decided that this abstracted the player from the world they were interacting with and opted for an alternative.
I have encountered a number of games where the virtual joystick (or d-pad) has worked quite successfully, namely Space Miner : Space Ore Bust and Meteor Blitz. But there has always been one issue that I’ve found it hard to get past and that’s the visible area that gets lost because of the on-screen controls. Take the following example from BloodnGuns :
The red areas in the lower corners of the screen, show not only the space taken up by the joysticks themselves, but additionally, the areas of the screen that were obscured by my thumbs during play. Now, I don’t profess to having the largest thumbs in the world, but you can see that, in total, I am losing about 1/3 of the screen real estate, purely because of the control mechanism.
I’ve also denoted in the orange areas, the space obscured by the HUD and the game controls. Obviously, you need to be able to pause the game and at any point see vital information about your player, but even the transparency of these areas isn’t much help when you have hundreds of zombies streaming towards you!
In this case, it’s kind of a moot point, as any other control scheme would make BloodnGuns a very different beast.
I have also considered that the iPad may have less limitations with it’s larger screen, but again, why have areas of the screen that the player can never see because of how they interact with their device?
So, with all this in mind, I began thinking back to the sessions I’d watched earlier, where the control scheme had been completely rethought to take advantage of the touch-based nature of the player interactions. While the control methods for dual shooters can’t inherently change, I am now heading down the route of building something very different from my original idea; something that will let the user see more of the world I build!
