Once again I was reminded how important playtesting at an early stage can be. Lawrence and I are working on another mobile game (tentatively titled Greased Up) that's in a super early alpha state. We had kids play it this weekend at Playtech and it really just settled a lot of looming questions and debates we had amongst ourselves. The most crucial was flicking.
The game centers around throwing a fat guy around a room and trying to destroy as much stuff as possible. Since we're using Box2D it's easy to get distracted by the ease at which you can create awesome physics demonstrations. Since I was using the iOS simulator to test things with my mouse, I had decided to use a joint connection for a springy effect. For me it was really fun to play with, but when we handed kids the device they just wanted to swipe the entire screen to push the fat guy around. You could see their frustration build as they had trouble touching the right spot to register grabbing.
I've recoded the interaction to use the entire screen as a gesture pad. It was really awkward at first for me to use, but I'm sure that when we playtest it again we'll have much better results.
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