Yes, I'm intrigued how one is going to bring "old-school arcade sensibilities" to a system where the inputs really need to be interpreted as "a user pressed sort of hereish, sort of nowish" and when the user does that, they also have to cover some percentage of the screen to do it. Precision is not available. Not all games require precision, so it's not a fatal problem, merely just another design issue to deal with, but it does sound fatal to a lot of "old school arcade" ideas.
>Not all games require precision, so it's not a fatal problem, merely just another design issue to deal with, but it does sound fatal to a lot of "old school arcade" ideas.
Not sure what the issue is. I've used tons of old-school arcade games in the 80s. They had horrible precision joysticks, guns ("operation wolf"), etc.
Well, speaking at least for the light-gun games, I've almost never enjoyed the arcade versions, especially the ones that don't even show a crosshair on the screen showing your current aim point. I far more enjoyed using the Wiimote to aim, since it was far, far more accurate than anything I've seen in the arcade... and lo, rail shooters turn out to be pretty fun after all!
(With a Wiimote you can actually develop muscle memory... ah, I need to aim here so I put the remote here, blammo. Trudging a massive hunk of plastic bolted to the cabinet, thus having a restricted range of motion, is just nothing like freely moving a Wiimote. Seriously, if you've got a Wii and you've never tried a "light-gun game" (ironically still called that despite the term being decades obsolete now), pick one up sometime. They're cheap.)
So, at least in my case, my experience directly contradicts your claim that accuracy isn't important for that genre. Also would have to say that when the joystick is not really working correctly, I immediately leave, and when they are working correctly, I don't know what you mean by them being imprecise.
The biggest challenge with mobile game design is not so much the precision of controls, it's the premium on screen real estate.
You have to put all the information of your game on the same layer as the controls- meaning your number one concern will be optimizing your interface and controlling the flow of information. It also means that the games you'll be making should be unique to touchscreen- games ported from other platforms are almost always inferior, in part because their design is optimized for a different platform.
