I can't tell you how confusing it is when I literally can't see a game *because* I am playing it or how frustrating it is to play a console port with virtual controls.
I really wish Square Enix had watched this before deciding to make the next Deus Ex for iPad. That was clearly an accountant's decision, not a developer's.
I'm not saying we should aspire to the NES controller per se.
The virtual D-pad is quite painful. However, placing buttons on both sides of the screen is legit as long as you never create a situation where someone needs to press two on the same side. The key here is the thumbs -- you have two of them and they can each comfortably hit one thing a time.
The megaman video posted by @RMS Oceanic shows a configuration which relies on both a virtual d-pad AND two buttons that need to be used simultaneously on the same side of the screen. It looked really hard to wall-jump while charging a shot, since you would have to have two free fingers on the right -- thus prohibiting holding the device like a book.
As for your comment there's a reason "new controllers aren't flat rectangles with buttons" -- yes, well, the developers don't get to decide whether touchscreen devices are flat.
Most of them are flat because they are designed to be transported easily. Phone-sized touch screens are usually made flat so they can fit in a pocket, and tablet-sized touch screen are designed to be carried like a book. They are flat so they can fit easily in backpacks, satchels, and laptop bags without displacing the other contents. The key here is that tablets are NOT gaming devices. They are general purpose devices which have all of the necessary specs to function as gaming devices. When someone is done playing Megaman on their iPad they may still want to read a book, or watch a movie by attaching it to an upright stand. Thats why we have modular rectangles to work with, and not elaborate streamlined organic shapes like the xBone controller.
Yes, as you point out there are still many "middle brow" consumers that keep lesser-known games afloat. As for some good games... you already listed 10000000.
I would also suggest Contre Jour. Its a physics puzzle game with elements from dozens of different games and a beautiful visual/audio style. The art style is reminiscent of a cross between World of Goo and Limbo, and the music is mostly original piano compositions with a french flare.
If you liked Canabalt I would also recommend Tiny Wings. True, its another retread of the one-button runner genre, but there are certain unique elements of the physics and button timing that make it endearing for me (specifically, its not tap to jump. Its hold to become heavier and release to become lighter).
But please use more concrete examples. Two assertions in particular were particularly intriguing...
"There are some amazing, ground-breaking genre-pushing things we can do with a touch screen"
This may seem intuitively true to James -- he may even have some specific ideas/mechanics in mind. But it is not obvious to me, and probably many other viewers. An example or further explanation would have helped a bunch.
"In every single [touch screen game] I've seen [that emulates a gamepad]… there's been a better native touch-based solution that could have been used"
This assertion is even more specific, which makes it all the more intriguing; James clearly had specific games and control system improvements in mind when he wrote this. But I (and the other viewers) do not know what he was thinking. I have no idea what a 'native touch-based' replacement for an emulated controlpad would look like.
Thanks for the response! Contre Jour definitely passed me by, but World of Goo and Limbo are favorites, so I'll definitely go back!
I'm still an outsider to the games industry, so I always wonder if it is like other industries, where the creators tend to be a group of people who consume a completely different set of products than the consumers. In the book world, the "literary" crowd is almost entirely divorced of the bestseller list. The same goes for all my music industry friends.
Sometimes, they are just ahead of the curve, and the market catches up to them. But more often, their taste is simply rarefied by constant exposure and expertise in the craft.
An episode for Mobile design is a good idea. As an avid mobile game player I know some designer don't think about all the pitfalls but as a designer of mobile business applications I understand the difficultly in producing applications for multiple different mobile devices and platforms. I think your viewers could benefit from some of that knowledge as well.
Yea, that sums it up. Game devs still consume the mainstream stuff, if for no other reason than to stay on top of the latest trends, but you definitely see a lot of interest in the fringe stuff, too. Maybe a little different then the book and music industry -- You don't have to read Harry Potter to write a good fantasy book, but you had BETTER play Call of Duty before you try to make an FPS.
In college I would have never expected that I would work somewhere that five people could have a conversation about Dwarf Fortress around the water cooler.
Please duo an episode on mobile platforms. This episode was good. I am developing a game for android right now and this episode helped me think about touchscreens in a better way.
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kelnishiGame Company CEOSan Mateo, CARegistered Usernew member
While I agree with you about design motivation and considerations, I think you're wrong about turn-based play being ideal and 2-handed controls. I've been working on a mobile game with synchronous PvP action and I'm confident we've solved a lot of these issues.
As I see it, designing user interfaces is about intent. The faster and more accurately you translate your users' intent into action (and feedback), the better the controls feel. Touchscreens have amazing interaction bandwidth... if you use it. One of the best examples of this is two-finger pinch zoom. You can manipulate 3 components of a transform simultaneously and with high-fidelity (position [2 floats], rotation [1 float], and scale [1 or 2 floats]). You get real-time feedback and your fingers aren't covering the area of interest. Doing this with analog sticks or a mouse is impossible.
Once we have good examples of how to do fast-paced 2D and 3D action in the AppStore, I think we'll see a flood touchscreen games that rival controller based games in terms of UX.
I would love if you did a video on the problems assosiated with mobile game design! My friend and I are currently trying to create a game for touch screen devices, such as phones and tablet, and this video has been a big help. Thank you for your weekly videos and I will look forward to next week's
Yes! I hope to become an indie developer sometime soon, and I'd love some insight on mobile device development.
Long time watcher, first time commenter. Keep up the thought-provoking, inspirational work!
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xeluDesigner and ArtistRomaniaRegistered Usernew member
Hey there, Concerned Joe designer here, I would love an episode on development for touchscreen devices. The main reason I have to always disappoint people when they ask me when my platformer game comes out on tablets is that emulating a keyboard\mouse input on a touchscreen is stupid. And this episode did a great job explaining that! Also, as Erzberger said slightly below me, GREAT illustrations this week, really liked them (especially the iphone\DS one). Amazing job with the episode and looking forward to seeing the next one!
I don't really understand why the DS was relegated to "stylus gaming" in this video. I've played a bunch of games that required input from the touchscreen for years on my DS, without ever using the stylus. This is because I would use the stylus with my left hand, but game right-handed. The way pretty much every touch-input game would require me to either use the stylus in my right hand (which I can't do, being left-handed), or game left-handed (which I can't do, after 25 years of right-handed gaming). As such, every game that required inputs on the screen required me to use my fingers, which I was able to do without any issues whatsoever.
While I would not mind seeing a video on mobile gaming at all, I would like it if you guys did some videos on games as art rather than just games as design like with the Spec-Ops videos or the games about religion in games.
I'm surprised the recent XCOM port wasn't mentioned - honestly the closest thing to a true console port I've ever seen on a phone, and the turn based combat and control scheme changes fit with the themes addressed in the episode.
Also, mark me down as another who thinks an episode detailing more phone games would be awesome. There's probably a whole episode worth of content based on just trying to make optimal use of the limited graphical resources and battery life of mobile devices. (For all it's greatness, about 3 missions kills a full battery on my phone. But it also means the iOS can run the unreal engine with a little graphical tweaking.)
Having worked on the iOS version of the game "Roundhouse," I won't call all touch screen joypads counter-intuitive. Maybe many of them are, but, at least for me, I got used to the input quickly. It works with the occasional mispress, but that's similar to a controller.
NOTE: I grew up playing console and arcade games with a controller, and PC games with a mouse and keyboard, so this is probably quite biased.
I know I'd sure love an episode on the potential problems in mobile gaming. In particular, asynchronous multiplayer is something MANY developers haven't figured out, even when their games would work fine with them.
A) The screen is relatively small, so with smaller screens you need much larger, easy to see graphics. I've played a few games where I've had to hold the phone closer to my face to see various details which weren't readily visible at a distance. It may seem arbitrary, but it may be relative to eye-strain.
It seems like very few people develop games for a portrait view, and there is a gulf between it, and a landscape-based view.
Granted that a touchscreen CAN'T do everything a mouse can do, especially not a mouse paired with a keyboard, but is there anything that it can do BETTER than a mouse?
Near as I can tell the only advantage is "I feel like I'm poking something."
But that comes at the expense of having a keyboard alongside it, having left and right clicks, being able to detect and respond when the cursor is "over" a button but not pressing it yet, having a customizable mouse cursor, being able to see what you're doing while you're doing it, the list goes on and on.
You keep saying this isn't a worse input device, just a different one, and that once we get used to it, we'll be able to make great games that play to its strengths... but what are those strengths? Unless you're talking about "it has a phone attached to it?" But you specifically say this isn't about mobile, just touchscreens, so I'm at a loss.
This was interesting to watch. I'd love to see an episode about the challenges of mobile gaming.
@WarpZone
Mice are unintuitive. There is nothing natural or logical about moving an object on a simulated screen. Think about it, you are moving your mouse on a mental representation of the screen you are looking at, this is something people who don't use computers often struggle with, especially when asked to add another scheme to that - link in FPS or in RTS where your need to move the mouse to represent your line of sight or to give commands on a spatial area.
Compare that to pulling a sling, or to flicking a blob, cutting a rope. These are games anyone, even people who don't like computers, can interact with because these are motions that give you a direct form of interaction.
There are benefits to touchscreens, we just need to get better at implementing them.
So you're saying normal people don't know how to use a mouse? That we're some kinda super-nerds just because we understand how a mouse works? Even though you can't apply for a retail job these days without demonstrating basic computer use? Really? Okay.
When I asked the same question in various IRC channels, I got three general types of responses: Touchscreen is better when the game's verb is something you would do with one or two fingers in real life, such as squishing ants or waking up cats. Touchscreen is better when the core mechanic is activated by swiping, (which can be surprisingly fast and accurate, more so than the same gesture performed with a mouse.) Touchscreen is better when multitouch is being used-- being able to zoom by pinching your fingers together, for instance, is a whole new application of touchscreens that can't be directly replicated by a mouse.
They also said mobile is better than PC whenever the touchscreen mechanic is combined with other device-specific features such as accelerometer or GPS, but this response is outside the parameters of what I was actually asking, and outside the scope of this episode. I'm mentioning it because it's still good to keep in mind.
I could see touchscreens being psychologically a little more hands-on than a mouse, but only slightly. The examples I got from asking people all seem more practical. "It feels better" shouldn't be your only reason for choosing touchscreen. "I had to, all the money's on iphone," shouldn't be, either. You should choose touchscreen when and only when it's the best tool for the job.
I'll echo many comment, you can make the touchscreen an okay form of control, but it was never really touched on what it can do better than controller and MK. I would say it's because the answer is pretty simple, nothing. Years of DS game where the touchscreen is either ignored within a few minute of used or ignored because the game flat out refuse to let you use something else (or the lack of analogue stick) greatly support my point.
Turn based "work" because you have all the time in the world, but it's still vastly inferior to both controller and MK. In most case the only example that sorta work are very gimmicky in nature (a game whose fun because of the input device, but if another game try to replicate with slight alteration will not renew the fun in the same way gears of war and uncharted have similar control but can renew the fun).
I have a strong feeling that in one or two console generation we'll see no touch screen because most people who like the small fun game (nothing wrong with that) will just buy them on there phone for .99 and won't buy a console for, and I really hope designer won't force the touch screen control on us for stuff we don't need it for (everything) wasting manpower and money that could go toward making the game better.
I think a problem with why there aren't many great games on smart phones is the developers themselves. Many design the games to be highly disposable. They seem to only care about making a quick buck on a app that in three months time, no one will remember it.
Thanks for the episode; I would love to hear more about the challenges of designing games for mobile. As a gamer I've never been interested in touchscreen games, but I attended a game jam recently where we had to build a tablet game and I had to learn a lot about them in a short space of time. I enjoyed the challenge so much that I decided to continue designing more games for this platform.The most difficult issues I find are the control system and limited screen space, but I try to be as creative as I can with it.
There is a huge flaw in the arguments in this episode: touch screen is utter crap. It is impossible to make precise due to the size of peoples fingers and it lacks the tactile feedback controllers, mice and keyboards have. While the lack of tactile feedback will eventually be dealt with (the future will look more like classic Trek not J.J. Abrams Trek except the buttons were not part of the surface before it was turned on, they appeared out of the surface) but the imprecision cannot be dealt with and it is the imprecision biggest flaw and why its such crap.
A mouse <em>can do</em> everything touch screen can but <em>much</em> better and with pixel perfect precision.
Angry Birds is only a success because of touch screens limitations, take away those limitations and Angry Birds is absolute crap.
One exception to the "controller emulation sucks": Twin-stick shooters seem to translate well. They usually don't require very precise motion, and joysticks can be implemented passably well on a touchpad.
Also, the key for virtual joysticks is to make them appear wherever the player puts their thumbs. If you do that, all you have to do is put your thumb on the screen and push in the general direction of where you want to go, which is pretty easy to do, and lets you put your fingers anywhere in case your thumbs are covering up the action.
@Lone Wolf: Not true. Unless you have a multi-touch mouse (only one I know of is Apple's magic mouse and that one kinda sucks at regular mouse stuff) there are a wide range of interactions which are possible on touchscreen but not on the traditional mouse+keyboard combo.
I think you kinda missed the point of the episode though - they are saying that *because* of the difference in precision and tactile feedback, dev's should be looking for more intuitive / creative methods of control than the traditional stick+buttons / mouse+keyboard paradigms.
Also - Angry Birds is successful because it's simple to learn, easy to control, has some humour (or at least kids find it funny), but there's also enough challenge in the physics side of things to make it engaging for people who want to make the perfect shot. It's that last point that makes it enduring - like Scorched Earth and its various clones (Worms series is still going strong)
I would like to see an episode on mobile gaming. In that episode, I think it would be impossible to go without mentioning gamification trends in apps, quazi-games like 4square, and issues of pricing.
A list of good mobile/touch games would be incredible, as those a very scarce and generally unreliable online. EC's definition of "good" as innovative and/or engaging is absolutely good enough
I had just been playing Rhythm Thief & The Emperor's Treasure and I realized it's both an example of an interesting game no one has played AND one that suits a mobile device's touch screen well. (I'm not sure if Rhythm Thief was made for the 3DS and ported to mobile or the other way around, but with the existence of games like Sonic Jump, SEGA seems to be the one major traditional game developer who understands mobile touch screens.)
@motigist
From what I can tell, good games going bad is the trend right now in the appstore. I look at reviews for almost any game on the top 100 or even outside it, and I see comments like "sux since the update," "why did you take away my favorite content?" "I paid for this game why does it require me to pay again just to win?" (Note: game currently listed as Free.)
Everyone is jumping on the exploitative monetization bandwagon, even games that were previously sold using a one-time fee and balanced and playtested as such. Imagine if someone came into your house and opened up your games and put most of your favorite levels or weapons behind a paywall. Now imagine that you had to pay again every time you play that level or pick up your weapon. Now imagine you complain about it, and all your friends complain about it, in fact 100% of the comments for the newest Halo game are complaining about it, but even though everyone hates it, it's making money anyway.
That's the norm on the app store right now. Good games going bad. And because it's psychological, I'm starting to worry that it's like the JC Penny's Effect, consumers will NEVER wise up because they're INCAPABLE of it, and this abuse will continue and get worse and accelerate until it is blocked by an act of law or something. Hope I'm wrong and all, because Congress NEVER knows WTF they are doing when they try to regulate technology, but this is where we stand. Good games or profitable games. Pick one. You can't have both.
I'm about to actually start a class about mobile game design at school- and it would be fantastic if you talked more about mobile games as a whole! I already think it'll benefit the class if I showed this video, as it can help people with the very start of designing and programming a touch screen game.
I'm mostly happy about this video because he helps me with a concept of a turn-based strategy game I have. Thank you so much!
Also, I send my compliments to the artist (who I wish I remembered the name of, whoops)! I loved the illustrations this week, and love the new style of the show overall.
I just had a crazy great idea for a game! The second he said GPS I thought it. Turn based RPG based in the real world! You turn on your GPS and then go to your game and click track my movement. You go around for the day with it on as long as you like and then turn it off whenever. When you get to a point where you are ready to play it tracks your movements through the day and gives you random encounters. You go from one to the next throughout the day and then at the end of them you will have gained alot of XP and money. Also depending on how far you had gone for the day you will have to continue the journey from one destination to the next day or you will have made it to your destination and the next town or plot point. It would almost be like a better fast travel.
Posts
I can't tell you how confusing it is when I literally can't see a game *because* I am playing it or how frustrating it is to play a console port with virtual controls.
I really wish Square Enix had watched this before deciding to make the next Deus Ex for iPad. That was clearly an accountant's decision, not a developer's.
I'm not saying we should aspire to the NES controller per se.
The virtual D-pad is quite painful. However, placing buttons on both sides of the screen is legit as long as you never create a situation where someone needs to press two on the same side. The key here is the thumbs -- you have two of them and they can each comfortably hit one thing a time.
The megaman video posted by @RMS Oceanic shows a configuration which relies on both a virtual d-pad AND two buttons that need to be used simultaneously on the same side of the screen. It looked really hard to wall-jump while charging a shot, since you would have to have two free fingers on the right -- thus prohibiting holding the device like a book.
As for your comment there's a reason "new controllers aren't flat rectangles with buttons" -- yes, well, the developers don't get to decide whether touchscreen devices are flat.
Most of them are flat because they are designed to be transported easily. Phone-sized touch screens are usually made flat so they can fit in a pocket, and tablet-sized touch screen are designed to be carried like a book. They are flat so they can fit easily in backpacks, satchels, and laptop bags without displacing the other contents. The key here is that tablets are NOT gaming devices. They are general purpose devices which have all of the necessary specs to function as gaming devices. When someone is done playing Megaman on their iPad they may still want to read a book, or watch a movie by attaching it to an upright stand. Thats why we have modular rectangles to work with, and not elaborate streamlined organic shapes like the xBone controller.
Yes, as you point out there are still many "middle brow" consumers that keep lesser-known games afloat. As for some good games... you already listed 10000000.
I would also suggest Contre Jour. Its a physics puzzle game with elements from dozens of different games and a beautiful visual/audio style. The art style is reminiscent of a cross between World of Goo and Limbo, and the music is mostly original piano compositions with a french flare.
If you liked Canabalt I would also recommend Tiny Wings. True, its another retread of the one-button runner genre, but there are certain unique elements of the physics and button timing that make it endearing for me (specifically, its not tap to jump. Its hold to become heavier and release to become lighter).
But please use more concrete examples. Two assertions in particular were particularly intriguing...
"There are some amazing, ground-breaking genre-pushing things we can do with a touch screen"
This may seem intuitively true to James -- he may even have some specific ideas/mechanics in mind. But it is not obvious to me, and probably many other viewers. An example or further explanation would have helped a bunch.
"In every single [touch screen game] I've seen [that emulates a gamepad]… there's been a better native touch-based solution that could have been used"
This assertion is even more specific, which makes it all the more intriguing; James clearly had specific games and control system improvements in mind when he wrote this. But I (and the other viewers) do not know what he was thinking. I have no idea what a 'native touch-based' replacement for an emulated controlpad would look like.
Thank you.
Thanks for the response! Contre Jour definitely passed me by, but World of Goo and Limbo are favorites, so I'll definitely go back!
I'm still an outsider to the games industry, so I always wonder if it is like other industries, where the creators tend to be a group of people who consume a completely different set of products than the consumers. In the book world, the "literary" crowd is almost entirely divorced of the bestseller list. The same goes for all my music industry friends.
Sometimes, they are just ahead of the curve, and the market catches up to them. But more often, their taste is simply rarefied by constant exposure and expertise in the craft.
Yea, that sums it up. Game devs still consume the mainstream stuff, if for no other reason than to stay on top of the latest trends, but you definitely see a lot of interest in the fringe stuff, too. Maybe a little different then the book and music industry -- You don't have to read Harry Potter to write a good fantasy book, but you had BETTER play Call of Duty before you try to make an FPS.
In college I would have never expected that I would work somewhere that five people could have a conversation about Dwarf Fortress around the water cooler.
As I see it, designing user interfaces is about intent. The faster and more accurately you translate your users' intent into action (and feedback), the better the controls feel. Touchscreens have amazing interaction bandwidth... if you use it. One of the best examples of this is two-finger pinch zoom. You can manipulate 3 components of a transform simultaneously and with high-fidelity (position [2 floats], rotation [1 float], and scale [1 or 2 floats]). You get real-time feedback and your fingers aren't covering the area of interest. Doing this with analog sticks or a mouse is impossible.
Once we have good examples of how to do fast-paced 2D and 3D action in the AppStore, I think we'll see a flood touchscreen games that rival controller based games in terms of UX.
Have a good day,
-EGK
Long time watcher, first time commenter. Keep up the thought-provoking, inspirational work!
Also, mark me down as another who thinks an episode detailing more phone games would be awesome. There's probably a whole episode worth of content based on just trying to make optimal use of the limited graphical resources and battery life of mobile devices. (For all it's greatness, about 3 missions kills a full battery on my phone. But it also means the iOS can run the unreal engine with a little graphical tweaking.)
NOTE: I grew up playing console and arcade games with a controller, and PC games with a mouse and keyboard, so this is probably quite biased.
Also, you can learn more about Roundhouse here:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Roundhouse-Victory-Point-Games/560557723967831?ref=ts&fref=ts
and here:
http://www.RoundHouseGame.com
A) The screen is relatively small, so with smaller screens you need much larger, easy to see graphics. I've played a few games where I've had to hold the phone closer to my face to see various details which weren't readily visible at a distance. It may seem arbitrary, but it may be relative to eye-strain.
Granted that a touchscreen CAN'T do everything a mouse can do, especially not a mouse paired with a keyboard, but is there anything that it can do BETTER than a mouse?
Near as I can tell the only advantage is "I feel like I'm poking something."
But that comes at the expense of having a keyboard alongside it, having left and right clicks, being able to detect and respond when the cursor is "over" a button but not pressing it yet, having a customizable mouse cursor, being able to see what you're doing while you're doing it, the list goes on and on.
You keep saying this isn't a worse input device, just a different one, and that once we get used to it, we'll be able to make great games that play to its strengths... but what are those strengths? Unless you're talking about "it has a phone attached to it?" But you specifically say this isn't about mobile, just touchscreens, so I'm at a loss.
Name a great iphone game that can't exist on PC?
@WarpZone
Mice are unintuitive. There is nothing natural or logical about moving an object on a simulated screen. Think about it, you are moving your mouse on a mental representation of the screen you are looking at, this is something people who don't use computers often struggle with, especially when asked to add another scheme to that - link in FPS or in RTS where your need to move the mouse to represent your line of sight or to give commands on a spatial area.
Compare that to pulling a sling, or to flicking a blob, cutting a rope. These are games anyone, even people who don't like computers, can interact with because these are motions that give you a direct form of interaction.
There are benefits to touchscreens, we just need to get better at implementing them.
When I asked the same question in various IRC channels, I got three general types of responses: Touchscreen is better when the game's verb is something you would do with one or two fingers in real life, such as squishing ants or waking up cats. Touchscreen is better when the core mechanic is activated by swiping, (which can be surprisingly fast and accurate, more so than the same gesture performed with a mouse.) Touchscreen is better when multitouch is being used-- being able to zoom by pinching your fingers together, for instance, is a whole new application of touchscreens that can't be directly replicated by a mouse.
They also said mobile is better than PC whenever the touchscreen mechanic is combined with other device-specific features such as accelerometer or GPS, but this response is outside the parameters of what I was actually asking, and outside the scope of this episode. I'm mentioning it because it's still good to keep in mind.
I could see touchscreens being psychologically a little more hands-on than a mouse, but only slightly. The examples I got from asking people all seem more practical. "It feels better" shouldn't be your only reason for choosing touchscreen. "I had to, all the money's on iphone," shouldn't be, either. You should choose touchscreen when and only when it's the best tool for the job.
Turn based "work" because you have all the time in the world, but it's still vastly inferior to both controller and MK. In most case the only example that sorta work are very gimmicky in nature (a game whose fun because of the input device, but if another game try to replicate with slight alteration will not renew the fun in the same way gears of war and uncharted have similar control but can renew the fun).
I have a strong feeling that in one or two console generation we'll see no touch screen because most people who like the small fun game (nothing wrong with that) will just buy them on there phone for .99 and won't buy a console for, and I really hope designer won't force the touch screen control on us for stuff we don't need it for (everything) wasting manpower and money that could go toward making the game better.
A mouse <em>can do</em> everything touch screen can but <em>much</em> better and with pixel perfect precision.
Angry Birds is only a success because of touch screens limitations, take away those limitations and Angry Birds is absolute crap.
Also, the key for virtual joysticks is to make them appear wherever the player puts their thumbs. If you do that, all you have to do is put your thumb on the screen and push in the general direction of where you want to go, which is pretty easy to do, and lets you put your fingers anywhere in case your thumbs are covering up the action.
I think you kinda missed the point of the episode though - they are saying that *because* of the difference in precision and tactile feedback, dev's should be looking for more intuitive / creative methods of control than the traditional stick+buttons / mouse+keyboard paradigms.
Also - Angry Birds is successful because it's simple to learn, easy to control, has some humour (or at least kids find it funny), but there's also enough challenge in the physics side of things to make it engaging for people who want to make the perfect shot. It's that last point that makes it enduring - like Scorched Earth and its various clones (Worms series is still going strong)
From what I can tell, good games going bad is the trend right now in the appstore. I look at reviews for almost any game on the top 100 or even outside it, and I see comments like "sux since the update," "why did you take away my favorite content?" "I paid for this game why does it require me to pay again just to win?" (Note: game currently listed as Free.)
Everyone is jumping on the exploitative monetization bandwagon, even games that were previously sold using a one-time fee and balanced and playtested as such. Imagine if someone came into your house and opened up your games and put most of your favorite levels or weapons behind a paywall. Now imagine that you had to pay again every time you play that level or pick up your weapon. Now imagine you complain about it, and all your friends complain about it, in fact 100% of the comments for the newest Halo game are complaining about it, but even though everyone hates it, it's making money anyway.
That's the norm on the app store right now. Good games going bad. And because it's psychological, I'm starting to worry that it's like the JC Penny's Effect, consumers will NEVER wise up because they're INCAPABLE of it, and this abuse will continue and get worse and accelerate until it is blocked by an act of law or something. Hope I'm wrong and all, because Congress NEVER knows WTF they are doing when they try to regulate technology, but this is where we stand. Good games or profitable games. Pick one. You can't have both.
I'm mostly happy about this video because he helps me with a concept of a turn-based strategy game I have. Thank you so much!