Puzzle game UI

[Ivan]

Hi

I've almost finished my first iPhone app which is a puzzle game based on a 16x16 playfield (20x20 pixel tiles). To move the tiles I was using the touchesBegan etc to calculate which tile and then user's swipe direction to move the tile. This worked great in the simulator but when I finally managed to get it to run on my iPhone the UI was far too fiddly because the tiles are small. I put this down fingers being a lot less accurate than the mouse pointer.

My solution (which I am currently coding so haven't tried yet) is to divide the code to give me one routine for tap (which places an animated cursor over the tile) and another routine for swipe. So the user now has to tap the tile and then they can swipe anywhere on the screen for direction. In addition to this I have got around the smaller tile issue by attempting to be a bit smarter with the tap and cursor positioning. When the user taps the screen I check where they tap and if it isn't on an interesting (moveable) tile then I do a quick search around the adjacent tile to see if they really meant one of those. (+ a bit of extra code for priority if more then one moveable tile is adjacent.)

The reason for this posting is just general discussion. I was curious how other people handle this sort of thing?
A alternative thought was to zoom in when the user taps such that they could select the tile more accurately but I figured this could take a while to code and may give the application a clunky feel.

The point is that it doesn't matter how good the game is, if the UI sucks then people just won't play it and it will get bad reviews/feedback.

I'd love to hear what other people are doing - making the playfield much smaller than 16x16 would be quite limiting.

Cheers
Ivan

[PhoneyDeveloper]

The recommended size for buttons and tableview rows is 44. My fingers are big and I kind of hate using the iPhone keyboard for anything. There is a special corner of hell reserved for the guy who designed the password entry field.

[Delirium]

You're on the right track. But what I've found, when giving people the opportunity to select an item, and then giving them the entire screen to move it, they never take advantange of that fact, and will just move their finger over the item, even if it's completely covered up by their finger. Perhaps an alternate solution would be to just have a zone around the item, that is big enough to grab hold of. That way you leave the rest of the screen open for other actions. Also, you need to remember that you may have female players, with long fingernails. They tend to use the device with the flat part of their thumb or finger, which is massive compared to a finger tip. And since the device chooses what part of the finger is the contact point, you need to make sure you're covering a large enough area to catch what is considered the actual touch location.