Hey All. I’m currently performing some research on mobile joystick and action button controls (jump A, fire B).
Im really interested in coming up with some actionable ideas that could improve this frowned upon control scheme for mobile devices, for all of us in the future.
Until recently I have only played a couple games that use a virtual joystick (dpad) on screen, and as of this writing I have not developed anything that uses joystick control.
My impressions from playing are the controls usually work OK however there is no touch feedback that allows the player to feel he is pushing the correct direction or button.
The only touch feedback usually available to a player is the sides/corners of the mobile device screen which isnt a great reference point for your thumbs because logically, usually the buttons arent set directly into the corners of the screen.
I’ve read several posts about how the joystick kinda sucks bad for mobile control, but that opinion really hasnt been explained in detail very often.
Id like to get as many opinions regarding joystick and action buttons as possible.
I know some have a very strong point of view about using the common/natural swipe, tap and touch controls for mobile because they are basically the natural controls for those devices - and designing for a joystick and action buttons is an unnatural fit for mobile.
This is a respectable and understandable opinion but like I said, Im curious if there are other reasons why joystick controls are disliked? Im interested in improving this control scheme to make it more acceptable and less avoided.
Have you experienced similar lack of tactile/haptic feedback when playing a game with joystick and action button controls?
Are there other reasons Im not yet aware of as to why joystick controls on mobile is disliked so much?
Disclaimer: I dont know the acceptable defined term for joystick and two button layout (like the NES controller) so I termed it joystick and action buttons.
I highly dislike mobile virtual joysticks… That’s partly why I never really got too much into mobile development.
Virtual Joysticks just don’t feel right. At least on a phone. A tablet they are okay. But on a phone, they cover too much of the screen in my opinion. So your thumbs are in the way, etc.
They should make a phone with a built in joystick and controller that slides out… Like the only phones where you would slide out the keyboard… Instead give it 1 or two joysticks and like 4 buttons for actions and a start and select or something. (Similar to the snes controller). only a joystick instead of a D pad.
First, lack of tactile response as you already mentioned, though there’s more to it than you mention. On a physical button there’s a difference between your finger sitting on the button and your finger actually depressing/actuating the button. On a touch screen there isn’t. In a tense moment I can rest my finger on the appropriate physical button in advance without looking, with a touch screen I have to either avert my eyes from whatever is going on and/or just trust that I’m hovering my finger over the appropriate area.
Also, with joysticks there’s both contour and self-centering pressure on a physical stick which help you to know what you’re doing with it. These are absent on a touch stick, meaning that players have to rely more on visual cues to get feedback on their input. Which brings us to…
Latency. A physical button works by being physically moved, which is a first piece of feedback that has no latency. That input is then read in the game’s next update loop and applied, for which there is going to be a small, hopefully transparent amount of latency. With touch controls that amount of latency is the minimum for your first round of feedback, that otherwise would have come from your controller’s physical nature. Worse, when it’s carelessly implemented, the input given to that control might not make its way to the rest of the game until the next update.
Between the things mentioned so far it’s easy to end up with controls that feel loose, sloppy, or imprecise.
Next, there’s the fact that you’re taking up screen real estate on a device where that’s already at a premium. It also has a flow-on effect on your UI design because to touch the buttons your fingers/thumbs have to cover a part of the screen, which practically limits what you can do with your layouts.
It may help to look at this backwards. What advantages does a joystick give on other platforms?
On a PC a joystick gave high precision movement with easy access to key buttons. On a console controller a duel joystick set up does the same thing.
On a mobile you don’t get any of the advantages that a joystick provides on PC or console. Precision is lower then other input methods. Access to key buttons is impaired.
So I’ll put it back on you, what do you hope to bring to mobile with a joystick?
I just had a random thought while reading a couple Made With Unity writeups.
I thought - what if there was some type of tactile feedback joystick overlay that had raised nubs to represent center left/right & up/down.
That could provide a little bit more feedback to the players to feel the directional buttons better.
Precision is lower than other methods BUT feels better when controlling a 1st or 3rd person game.
What kind of touch/swipe control is better than a joystick for these types of games on mobile?
Off the top of my head - I say none.
Floating joystick? The difference is that floating joystick doesn’t have a fixed position like virtual joystick, so you don’t have to remember/look where is the joystick position. The position of the beginning of the touch will be the zero position for the joystick.
The advantage is that you can touch anywhere in the touch area, and since it will be the zero position, as long as you dont drag anywhere your player wont do any movement too. Now in the virtual joystick, you have to position your finger exactly at the center of the joystick to do that, or else, the character will start to move in unexpected direction, or worse, you can just miss the joystick entirely.
Plus, floating joystick usually wont appear when no touch detected, so it wont cover/block your gameplay area…
I think it would be interesting to explore an interface that used some sort of electrostatic response or something to simulate a physical button or even a sort of ‘flat’ joystick. The idea being that this response field can be felt and dragged by your finger and moved around, and perhaps even incorporates a springy ‘return to center’ resistance.
I think that joysticks would be useful particularly for those sorts of games where the action being simulated is physically heavy and response-laden, such as driving vehicles (cars, planes etc). It wouldn’t feel very nice to steer a 747 in some game with touch, there’s too much of a disconnect between what you feel as you interact with the screen, and what is going on on the screen (hundreds of tons of stuff shifting around). You would be totally removed from the visceral enjoyment of it. Whereas with a joystick you have all sorts of feedback possibilities.
ps I agree that for fps games, joysticks are still the best so far - you want to feel like your character has weight and momentum and being able to flick them around with a swipe isn’t very gratifying.
Sure, I know someone’s going to say that these sorts of games are not a good fit for mobile, and to some extent that’s true. Still, there are a lot of mobile games out there of this kind that get played for one reason or another.
Thanks, good point. I wasn’t fully aware of the issue and had to google what that even means. Do you know what a reasonable assumption on minimum NKRO values for keyboards are? If it’s support for pressing 6 keys at once I should be fine. 3 would potentially be an issue.
There was the Xperia that had a slide out gamepad but I don’t know how well it did.
I agree about the phones being effectively covered by thumbs when using them. On my iPad I used to play a lot of world of tanks & it uses 2 thumbsticks. The controls were pretty good but my thumbs gradually slid over the screen until they were often not on the thumbsticks. Tablets are heavier than gamepads, & not shaped to be comfortably held for periods of time so the hands shift position to try & find new comfortable positions.
I also have a weird issue where for some reason touch screens aren’t as responsive for my fingers as they are for other people. This problem seems to combine with the different joysticks designed in games so that I get erratic performance, some games the joysticks are responsive & others just don’t seem to register that I’m touching the screen.
On PC you’re safe simultaneously pressing 2…3 keys at once max. That does not include Ctrl/Alt/Shift, because they apparently get special treatment. Anything above that and a cheap keyboard may “jam” and start beeping via system speaker.
If keys are in the same row, higher chance of lockup. That makes PC poorly suitable for fighting games, and poorly suitable for using keyboard as a midi keyboard replacement.
IIRC jam will occur if you use 3 cursor keys out of four, in combinations like ASDR (pressed at once) and the like.
My current keyboard has 12 key rollover, honestly I was very annoyed that it isn’t FULL-N-rollower, but since I couldn’t find any other keyboard I liked in the whole town, I just sorta gave up on it.
its just shitty trying to bring a concept from a other system to mobile. Mobiles have touch which depending on the type of game can be one of the best input methods. Just like the duel sticks of console is very good for action or racing games and how the fast and accurate input of the mouse gives PC a edge when it comes to Strategy and Shooters. You dont see many rts games on console for a reason, and you see many pc gamers with gamepads to play certain games for a reason too.
You should build to the the strengths of your targets input system, or even choose platform based on what input system best suits your game style.
Darn it! I think because it is common in relation to those types of games on other systems.
Just knowing that mobile gaming is the future I think it very important to concept improvements for the input feedback for all types of games for that platform.
Dont want to settle an definitely dont want to ignore a large gamer segment that really would like to have as close to a similar experience as they do on other systems.
And even though people frown at joystick controls on mobile - there are a LOT of popular games that use that control scheme, so its apparant even though it sucks - players are willing to overlook the negatives to play good games with joystick controls.
Why? Because there is no joystick or joypad. It is just an image and a screen. The game is on the screen. The control pad is on the screen. It is just not good for any kind of action game IMO.
No. Mobile will never escape from being for casual games. It’s going to be a bitter pill, but core games do not work on mobile. It is not the apex platform of gaming. It exists in its own separate world from what came before it, and the two worlds are not compatible with one another.
I didn’t mind ‘relative movement’ too much where it didn’t matter where you initially touch but if you essentially drag to the left then the player heads to the left more or move the finder further down from there the player moves down, but you have to scale the input somewhat otherwise your finger is going to go all over the screen, and not so useful for multi-screen games cus you’d have to pick your finger up a lot.
Lack of physical buttons is a problem cus your fingers keep moving outside the button zone. Also you can’t tell if you’re in the button zone, so you’re constantly having to stop and look at where your fingers are in case you slipped, cus you can’t trust it. And then sometimes your fingers do slip outside the zone in the middle of some movement and it sort of makes it seem like the input is ignoring you, which is annoying.
I don’t think there is really any valid way to ‘replace’ joystick-like button controls on a touch screen. It’s a touch screen, accept it, live with it. But you can explore alternative control schemes that are more intuitive or less dependent on where the finger is. Trying to basically ‘do a joystick’ when there is no physical input is I think just an insane idea that will never work. Hitting a square peg into a round hole.
Back when touch-screen smart-phones were new I wondered if it might be possible to design a transparent surface coating that could provide tactile feedback – at the time I was only thinking about creating raised on-screen keyboard buttons. About a year later Sony patented the idea. To my knowledge they never actually built anything, though.
There are lots of different add-on physical joysticks for smart-phones. Here’s one I just found at random, others attach in different ways but the basic idea is the same: