I’ve been working on a mobile game, and in the game the player can choose between different bullet types or power ups to destroy enemies. The game can get rather fast paced, and I’ve been advised that my current system of weapon selection (you only have to watch that video for a few seconds) is rather tedious. It’s been suggested that I choose a faster/better method.
I chose my current method after taking inspiration from Witcher 3 for PS4 (the interface for choosing spells in Witcher 3 is really good), but perhaps I didn’t implement it as well.
I’m not sure about adding a sidebar because it’ll take up valuable screen real estate, especially since I’ll eventually remove the “restart” button and make room for a pause button and score display.
What selection interface do you think could work?
PS: If you don’t have any suggestions, you can show me a game that has an interesting mechanic that could help me.
If the player is always touching the screen to aim, you could bring up the weapon select when the player takes his finger off the screen. See Sky Force for an example.
Funny you mention the Witcher 3, because I was thinking exactly that before I read that part of your post.
Why don’t you do it exactly like Wwitcher 3? Press a button to bring up the weapon select “pie” in the center of your screen and choose your weapon from there. Even if it wasn’t circular, just big buttons and big icons to make it simple and obvious what you’re choosing.
Don’t offer the player weapon selection. Check out how its done in Shooty Skies, which is basically the same game as your demo. A single touch in a single location can control a heck of a lot.
To surmise the Shooty Skies input summary
The character follows the players finger.
The character is shooting when the player is touching the screen.
The character charges a super weapon when the player removes their finger from the screen. If charged the super weapon fires as soon as the player touches the screen.
Bonus weapons are automatically picked up and applied when the character touches them.
I just checked out the vid.
The weapon selection menu is okay, but selecting weapons in that manner
is okay, but kinda tedious.
To select weapons, why not do it the way Metroid Prime 1 does it.
On the nintendo gamecube controller, the weapons are assigned:
To the right C sticks 8 way directions. And are displayed on the screen
as a plus sign, with 4 icons.
Up - power beam Down - plasma lava beam Left - Purple wave beam Right - shot gun ice beam blaster
But in your case, you will need to create, a cool touch screen version of it.
eg. an 8 way or more, directional compass touch icon, with pics of the
different laser guns all around it.
In other words, pressing one of the directions, let’s you use a specific weapon.
Watching your video, it looks like the player character never moves up/down. Maybe leverage gestures that you aren’t using already? Swipe up/down to change weapons same as a mouse wheel scroll in your typical FPS does.
Disclaimer: I don’t uplay mobile games so my two cents is worth just that.
