Another fun little development snippet from this weeks Game Jam. In Raptor Frenzy we created a retro controller for the iPhone. As we got to testing and actually playing the game, the controller went through a few revisions.
In our first version, the jump button was positioned above the move left and right buttons, while the attack button had a prominent placement in the right side. This layout turned out to be rather awkward, the mapping of the jump button next to the movement buttons meant that we had effectively restricted moving and jumping to a one-hand operation, meaning you had to choose whether you wanted to move OR jump, it was pretty tricky to do both at the same time - not the sort of dynamic we where going for.
In the second revision we addressed the issue above, but it turned out that the juxtaposition of the move buttons in relation to the new jump and (smaller) attack buttons, meant that when it got hectic you’d sometimes tap outside the move buttons. The larger vertical area of operation on the right side simply got confusing in relation to the slimmer move area on the left side.
In the final revision, we ended up making the move buttons comically large to kill the alignment issue above. It looked kinda silly, but it worked much much better. As the operation of the controls where now of equal size, it meant almost no slip-ups or confusions when hitting the buttons.
This just goes to show how powerful it is to have a reconfigurable controller, and iterating the design process with some playful testing in between.
