I like creating. I love gaming. Creating games is my passion.
April 6, 2013
Me and my team are almost done with the polishing on our game, which we have decided to name Expandaball. It’s been a long road since the first prototype from the 2012 global game jam Size Matters, but now a commercial release is finally upon us. We intend to show a demo on the Festival of Games so come visit us if you want.
But that is not what this post is about. Lately we have done a lot of testing on mobile devices to perfect the experience and especially the touch control system. Mostly I’ve been testing on my android Nexus 7 which I purchased specifically for this purpose. I just never before saw the need for a tablet device when I already have a perfectly good PC and notebook.
So I thought, maybe I should put this tablet to use and do some scouting. Try out some mobile games and try to see what’s the hype with these devices. So I downloaded some free games from the play store, and noticed they are mostly crappy micro transaction based games with very simple game gameplay. Then a bit later I took a look at regular games with a purchase price. Unfortunately the Play market only accepts credit card, which I will not get, due to not having a fixed income. (Fix that Google!) Luckily there was the Humble Android Bundle to the rescue with a collection of great games for my device. Among them was Metal slug and Raiden Legacy.
I still have some fun memories playing Metal Slug on an arcade while on vacation somewhere at a young age. And Raiden also seemed to be loads of fun for my tastes. In each of these I quickly went down in a blaze of glory. A significant reason for this was simply my lack of experience with these types of games. (My exposure to arcades was quite limited while growing up) The more important reason was the frustrating controls.
I was simply unable to control my character fine and fast enough to avoid all the glorious firepower. Every once in a while my fingers would slide off the virtual d-pad without me noticing, or the smudged touch screen would fail to register I just moved my finger a few millimeters to the side to avoid that yellow dot.
The games are not at fault. These games were originally designed to be played with physical buttons and worked great. The transition to a touch screen just didn’t work very well. If this was a console or a PC I would just have plugged in a game pad and all would be well. As a gamer I have always before taken the physical feedback offered by the gamepad or joystick or keyboard for granted. Just goes to show we usually don’t know what’s valuable until it’s missing.
Expandaball also requires a lot of fine control. Luckily our game is quite slow paced so touch controls are still doable with , but the fact remains that keyboard and game pad just offer better control and thus a better experience to the player so we’ll definitely try to release on different platforms.
I don’t see touch devices ever becoming serious contenders for complex or twitch gaming, which makes me sad because I imagine there might be a lot of indie devs who want to make these types of games, but unable to get their game on a real gaming console or handheld due to the closed nature of these ecosystems. Maybe the Ouya will change that. Otherwise there’s always the PC platform so maybe things aren’t all bad. Unfortunately, this could mean that there will always be a divide between mobile gaming and the core gaming markets.