Ok I need to get some opinions: I'm developing a game that needs an 8x8 board (same layout as bejeweled, but different objective). My game doesn't really work well with a 7x7 board or less. I really liked how the game worked in the simulator, but on the real iphone it seemed to me like the squares were too small, and it was easy to touch the wrong one. Even though I'm making an iphone game, I never played iphone games, or even used an iphone before. So I don't know if the problem is the game or my lack of experience with the touchscreen. So what do you think? 1. Do you think that cells are too small? 2. Do you think tapping twice or dragging is the easier way to move the pieces from square to square?
Try the lite version of 3D Chess. A few people didn't like it but it works. http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=316162380&mt=8
I'm not quite sure what you have in mind. How would it work, what would it look like? Can you give more details?
Try our Othello game, flipNgive. I went with 3 board sizes... 4x4, 6x6, 8x8 and had good feedback on usability. We let the users either click on a square, or drag a piece to a square -- as long as you give good visual feedback on which square is active (blooms / highlights) there shouldn't be much problem with 7x7. --yarri
In Sushi Mayhem I used a 7x6 board. The cell sizes I used seemed about just right to me. I find that the 8x8 size boards (such as PuzzleQuest) are a bit too small. It can still work if making a mistake is simply going to swap the pieces back to where they were... if its more fast paced or clicking on the wrong piece can get you into trouble I'd try to find another solution.
I went with 8x8 for my game. (For obvious reasons .) ...and initially I also thought the grid was too small. The size of the pieces was a big complaint from my testers. Eventually I added the ability to see what piece you're moving, as well as highlighting where you're moving the piece to, and both seemed to help things quite a bit. Visual feedback is a good thing.
What about some method to zoom in or pan around on the board? Might work for some games, chess for example...
i downloaded action chess and still found it difficult Im not sure how to do that, my programming skills are fairly minimal going to 7x7 would severely, hurt my game. Im trying to avoid having to do that, but if thats the only way to make it playable I will.
If you look at Puzzlemaniak, some of the games work at 12x12! Older versions of the app had a zoom feature, which I used at first but soon dropped as it was easier to cope with the occasional mispress than fiddle with the zoom controls. Of course, any Sudoku app has to be able to cope with 9x9. Not sure if this would work for your app or not but you could also try making it so that when a touch goes down, a circle/cross or something is displayed around the cell you would be selecting and this selection tracks your finger until you let go. Only then would the selection happen. That sort of feedback can really help.
by zooming i mean being able to pinch with two fingers to zoom and then drag your finger to pan around.
Did you turn on the visual feedback in the settings screen? I think maybe one of them is on by default, but not both. FWIW, my 7 year old nephew had no problems with the controls. It's really only been my testers with "big fingers" who have had problems. Look into the UIScrollView documentation. That's basically how apple gives you access to the pinch/zoom functionality. Googling also finds some tutorials. Zooming wouldn't have worked for my game, but I don't know what you're trying to do, exactly. (Want to share some of your game ideas? Feel free to PM me if you want. I have more than enough of my own, so you shouldn't fear I'll steal them. )
For my Xiangqi board game (a chess variant), in early testing I found that the bigger problem was seeing where you were dragging pieces. Your finger is covering up lots of pixels, making it tricky to drag to a precise location. What I did to resolve this was to draw a crosshair - you see a subtle vertical line and horizontal line that highlights exactly the row/col you've dragged over. Combine this with an undo feature, and you've got your bases covered. As for dragging vs. tap, there's no reason not to support both. The gestures aren't ambiguous. If you tap a piece, than tap a valid dest, that signals you wanted to move that piece there. If you finger down on a piece, then drag to a valid dest, that also signals you want to move that piece there. Using pinch/zoom for games like this to work around fat finger problems is almost as clumsy as the problem it is meant to address. Phil
Try the 8x8 mode in this game... the key is good visual feedback. http://itunes.com/apps/flipngive --yarri
