Mobile Gaming and the War On Fat Fingers

Gamasutra reports on a talk at this year's Game Developers Conference by Mike Pagano, game producer for EA Mobile. Pagano brought up the difficulty in designing games for devices like the iPhone, where screen real estate is already limited, and a poorly implemented UI will result in players' thumbs and fingers blocking crucial parts of the action. Quoting: "Pagano recommends button maps on the bottom of the screen, finger-sized, whenever possible, keeping interface away from the play area. 'Apple puts the main interactions on the very bottom of the screen,' he said. 'When you're unlocking for example, you know you can read what's on top. That's a huge thing, especially when you're designing games.' ... For accelerometer input, 'we did a lot of tuning with this SOB,' Pagano said, referring to Spore Origins. Pagano stressed that games using the accelerometer should have a mechanism to allow players to change their zero positions, effectively letting them play in a variety of positions — sitting in bed, leaning over the device, or holding it up. Early in development, Spore Origins had a touchscreen control scheme. 'Where it started to fall down was, again, sausage fingers.' Said Pagano. 'We made our decision right there to flip to the accelerometer.'"

Comments

Inherit problem of touch screens

[El_Muerte_TDS]

You will always have this problem where input and output share the same space. The obvious solution is to separate input from output.

Bluetooth joystick?

[Crookdotter]

What about a folding bluetooth joystick? I've wanted one of these for years and that would eliminate any need for buttons and touchscreen use, AND it's another peripheral to sell to the gamers out there. With MAME being enabled for pretty much any device these days, I want to see a standard bluetooth joystick (or joypad for the young uns) that you can fold up and put in your pocket.