I am making a twin stick shooter and I am running into a design conundrum.
I want to port the game to touch only devices and I am not sure on how to approach the controls.
I have considered using virtual joysticks, but that rubs me the wrong way. While a virtual joystick is better than virtual buttons in the way that you don’t have to lift your fingers off of the screen after you placed them. This means that you won’t be fumbling to press something. I don’t like virtual sticks that much myself but I will still try the game to see if it works. I have read that some people first look to see if there are virtual “anything” and then immediately uninstall it if so.
I have looked at how others have approached this and it seems that the majority of others have used virtual sticks. When I am playing with virtual sticks I am fine with the aiming part, I slow down with my movements of the character.
He discusses the varied controls schemes of virtual sticks and states that of the games he looked at Geometry Wars: Touch has the best combination for controls of this nature.
My reasoning to port this over to touch is, admittedly, kind of weak. I want to be able to play this game on my Surface Pro 2 without breaking out a gamepad or keyboard and mouse. This can be helpful when I show it off to other people. While this would be nice to have I don’t absolutely need this.
Should I just bite the bullet and say, “No touch controls”?
you could perhaps go the route of tap to shoot, slide to turn/aim. that way you really only need the left stick for moving, and it also gives the bonus of not having to look straight at something in order to shoot it.
I have played a game where the controls were to slide to move in that direction then you tap to aim and shoot. It was extremely hard to control and didn’t work.
The idea of using that design to aim is a much more appealing idea that I haven’t considered. The thing that I worry about is that the shooting will be trivialized by you having to first move the aiming reticle then shooting rather than just tapping the enemy to shoot. In theory it makes sense, but in practice it might be unintuitive.
Though it is something that I need to consider as it could still be a viable solution. Thanks for the suggestion.
You can play geometry wars on ipad, two virtual controls I guess… kind of works, but I find it a bit awkward. Its not ideally suited to touch/tap/swipe. Fingers can’t tell where they are on the smooth screen and its easy to go outside the control area or for greasy fingers to get stuck. I suggest trying some games that actually have the controls you want to implement and see how they feel.
I have been looking around a bit to see how others have implemented those controls. I have even encountered the very controls scheme presented in Geometry Wars: Touch (only the movement was limited by the classic 8 way style). It seemed to work well but the speed of the character was too unwieldy for the arena so I kept bumping into walls.
Having the controls on at a fixed location and you can’t change its position in the options is really not an idea situation and is frustrating.
As for outside factors, like the greasy fingers, I have encountered that in a lot of games that require dragging an object or something along those lines. So I understand that that could be problematic and something to think about.
Do you think it would be worth adding it into my game just as an option based on your experience? Or should I just leave it out?
I am starting to lean towards adding it just in case someone doesn’t have the other options available.
I dislike virtual joysticks and feel if an app has had to resort to them then they are basically working against the hardware not with it, which sets alarm bells ringing. Never found a game that uses them to be any fun to play, found them awkward to use in terms of feeling in control or providing a natural interface between me and the game, not to mention that they end up having you hands/fingers obscuring much of the screen.
That said I believe it’s often possible to find alternative solutions in many cases, but literally converting a twin-stick shooter is probably beyond that point. The problem here is there are simply too many inputs to map to a touch device, even one with auxillary inputs such as gyroscope, without resorting to virtual sticks.
So had been asking about making a twin-stick shooter on mobile I would strongly suggest not, but as you’ve already made one and simply want to experience it on mobile, maybe it might be worth investigating further. At the very least you may as well implement virtual twin-sticks and see where that gets you first. However I suspect to make such a game work on touch you would have to change the control scheme to better fit the abilities of the devices.
The best method I’ve found is to use swipe to rotate, tap to shoot, and most importantly device orientation for careful aiming. You turn the device around and the view in-game adjusts accordingly. Like tilting the screen down to aim up, or turning it clockwise to aim right. Very, very fun.
I completely understand your qualms with the virtual joysticks and in general it is not the best control scheme for touch only games. They are passable at best as I have yet to find a truly great example of them. I also agree that even trying to use other inputs like the gyroscope won’t help much and may even increase the difficulty of control.
As you mentioned, I am considering porting my existing game over to mobile. If I were trying to build this from the ground up it would be extremely unlikely that I would even consider this genre of shooter. As for the control scheme, my game is very straightforward, the only things that you would need to worry about is move and shoot. There are power-ups that speed you up, raise your damage level, and heal you, but it is really just down to the core mechanics of a twin stick shooter.
At this point, I think I will wait on the touch controls. I don’t think trying to shoehorn a control scheme that was made with actual sticks in mind is the best approach. Maybe if I figure out a better way of controlling the character in the future I might revisit this idea, but for now I don’t think it is going to work out.
Out of curiosity, does anyone uninstall or not look at games based solely on the fact that there are virtual buttons/sticks as the main control scheme?
@Grimwolf While that works for games that don’t have that many enemies on screen at once, it wouldn’t be as practical as my game is pretty fast paced and a large majority of its difficulty is based on the shear number of enemies on the screen that you would have to face. I will admit that it is fun playing those types of games, it’s just normally the gameplay has to be tweaked in order to compensate for the controls.
Check out Solomon’s Boneyard, it has joysticks, and it is extremely comfortable to use.
Later on there are hundreds of enemies so that isn’t an issue either.
Looks like a lot of fun. Sadly I can’t actually try it (I don’t own an iOS device), but from what I have looked at it seems to be a much slower paced game and a lot of the weapons used have an area of effect or a chain reaction style attacks (like how lighting shocks multiple enemies or how bullets explode). These are great design choices as having a touch only device you lose a bit of precision. It also is based on a 8 direction movement, further simplifying the controls. Again, a smart design choice.
But sadly I cannot comment on the comfort of the control scheme and I will have to take your word for it.