User interface control models for mobile

[TheHermit]

I think this is probably the right subforum for this, but I thought it'd be useful to discuss various interface models for mobile games and ways of adapting traditional interface ideas from desktop to work in a mobile environment (for porting purposes, for example).

 

- Let me start with an example. I've got a game right now that uses tooltips for all of its documentation. On mobile, this could mostly just be 'click on the text to get a popup describing it' but in a few cases at least, the tooltips pop up when you hover on buttons; obviously this won't work in mobile environments. The solution that we came up with was to have a 'help mode' toggle button that makes it so that a touch gets information rather than activating UI elements. I'm not incredibly satisfied with that solution though.

 

- Another example: I've seen a number of vertical shooter type games designed for mobile. On PC, you could both move the craft and aim the craft's guns (e.g. using mouse for aim and arrows for movement). You can't really do that on mobile. One gimmick I've seen in a few places is to have a bar at the bottom of the screen where you drag a tile left and right to position your ship, but I've found the problem with this is that when you play it on desktop, the mouse too easily leaves the bar when you're dodging, and so you lose control for a few seconds and get destroyed. If I really needed aim and movement, I might try multi-touch (one finger aims, the other centers the ship) but I think it would be clunky. 

 

- For larger tablets, you could make something like a gamepad in the lower part of the screen and have the player use it like they would use a handheld console.

 

Anyhow, are there other mobile interface models that you like to use in your games, things you think could be improved on, etc?