Great job on this game! It adapts surprisingly well to mobile and is a blast to play.
The biggest hangup for me is the downward swipe. It is fast but can sometimes be difficult to perform and is not intuitive when starting out. It is currently impossible to play the game without reading the Touch Gestures post. An in-game tutorial will help but I’d still like to see an alternative option.
What if you tap and hold an object to see a list of actions to perform? It could be combining items, eating, picking up a basket, etc.
This would also help with the container interfaces. If you have four items in your backpack and need to access that one berry before dying, you currently have to cycle through each object.
Thanks! Most of the credit goes to Jason, but we have definitely worked hard to adapt it to touchscreen too
We noticed that the drop gesture could malfunction. It works much better now in version 0.9.8. Would be great if you would update through TestFlight and try it again, then let us know what you think?
You are definitely correct, and we have contemplated similar GUI designs. So far we have decided against it, for these reasons:
Jason has purposely designed the game so every action (mouse click) is shown on screen, both to you and the other players. There’s no hidden inventory, by design. Your suggestions would arguably improve the interface on desktop too, yet Jason has not seen fit to design it that way.
The communication between client and server has no support for selecting an item in a container. We would have to deviate from the communication protocol to support this choice.
This doesn’t mean that there will never be a change. Just wanted to point out that there are non-obvious reasons for keeping it “close-to-the-original”. We’d love to see more discussion and suggestions on how the touch interface could be improved.
Yeah, it’s tricky. Mouse over info is a client only thing, as it doesn’t change the game’s state. Picking is ruled by the server, so when you click on a basket in the original game, you will always pick up the last/first object, no matter what the mouse-over shows you.
I was going to raise similiar points to ryanb’s OP. I had no idea how to do anything until I read the forum post. Are you planning on including gesture instructions in the game? Maybe once the gestures are finalised?
The things I tried before giving up and coming here looking for further clues were tap and hold, double tap and double touch (two fingers at once). I think double tap could definitely be utilised. I would prefer to use double tap as right click instead of a swipe, or at least I would like to try it for comparison.
I feel like the touch gestures are non-intuitive. Without a forum post, I would have quit. I died too many times trying to figure out how to feed myself. It became stupidly frustrating.
I’d love to see an in-game tutorial or similar; I don’t think you can realistically expect people to just “get it” without guidance.
A tutorial like Jason’s with additional touch control features would be best. There is a lot to learn about this game.
How to move, pick up, eat, and combine objects.
How to interact with containers.
Where to find the recipes.
How to name yourself and babies.
There is a steep learning curve on PC which doesn’t have the control challenges. Most of the beta testers are experienced with the game so they just need to focus on what is different on mobile. Someone coming in with no OHOL experience will have a difficult time I think.
