I wanna talk about some of the things that we’ve been trying to focus on with regard to designing with touch controls in mind. To do that, we’ll discuss some of my observations on the history of design for touch, and how Obscured Edge is considering moving forward from there.
When smart phones were initially on the rise, mobile game developers had their work cut out for them. We had spent years designing for roughly the same interface: the controller. And suddenly we found ourselves without our lifeblood: buttons. This was a turbulent time for designers, and in some ways it still is.
Early State of Touch Controls
I remember seeing many attempts at hack and slash games, dungeon crawlers, RPGs, and platformers all with the equivalent of a directional pad drawn to the screen for input. Many users realized fairly quickly that this form of input made precision control very difficult without the feedback of feeling a physical button press under their fingers or thumbs. Not to mention that this design caused a user’s hands to cover important real-estate on the screen.
The Casual Revolution
Mobile developers were learning their way around an entirely new problem. With old control schemes being somewhat problematic for users, designers looked to entirely different game design styles than were standard for games at the time. Games commonly considered Casual became more of the standard as their turn based style and UI based gameplay were a perfect fit for touch controls.
Modern Touch-Based Games
Along with the casual revolution, other games were starting to pop up that used more natural touch controls like gestures as their base control schemes. These turned out to be much more natural for users, and therefore were very successful. Some of these games have even taken off to the point that they’ve become multi-million dollar industries with merchandise and their very own theme parks.
Where to Go From Here
At Obscured Edge, one of the ideas we’ve been playing with is how to revisit some of the older genres that got written off as not user friendly for touch, by introducing a new take on them. We believe that if you boil a game down to its true basics, it could bring about a simplicity that will allow for gesture-based controls. What if in an RPG your users were able to tap on UI buttons to bring up various aspects of the battle system like Fight, Magic, or Items instead of navigation via d-pad? What if in an action platformer, instead of charging your weapon by holding a button down, the player character automatically charged his weapon when not in use? Maybe we could use natural gestures, like swiping, to determine jump trajectories in precision platformers. By simplifying what we ask of the player, and boiling it down to the important decisions they’d be making, and then translating those decisions into something gesture based, we can bring any genre we want to touch. We just have to get a little creative. There are so many really great things to try from here, especially now that other games and designers have shown us what gestures feel natural to players. We love seeing new and interesting control schemes. And since the mobile market isn’t going anywhere, we’re really excited to see what the future brings.