Planning your game around touch

Unlike traditional mobile gaming platforms, we won't have physical buttons and a set interface blueprint to serve as a guide for our game.

Mobile platforms such as the Game Boy or PlayStation Portable have a physical control pad and buttons that lend the user to an inherent understanding of the game on screen. The user can quickly pick up and play a game, because they know that there is a finite set of buttons that can control game mechanics.

We're in a bit of a more difficult-to-manage scenario with iOS, as there is no control pad or face button to commonly dictate interaction on screen when in a game. Since we're on a touch screen device, we can create any interaction mechanic that we'd like, no matter how unorthodox the interface may be. This offers up an extraordinary opportunity for new gameplay experiences; however it does make our design work a bit more difficult to construct.

In this recipe, we'll discuss how touch screens drastically alter the...