I'm up to nearly twenty games on the iTunes Store, and not all of them have been good. Several of them are good concepts that I thought would work well, but as I made progress they didn't feel the way I wanted them to. The gameplay wasn't nearly as smooth as I had wanted it to be, and I couldn't think of any way to make it better. So I wanted to ask: Based on past experiences what types of games have you tried to make, but just couldn't find a way to make it play smoothly on an IOS device?
Games that requires up down left right A B buttons. With all the diff phone sizes its even harder to make, but I can't figure out a way to replace the buttons.
When I tried making an RPG game with multiple weapon types (Elda 2: Light Of The Gods http://appsto.re/us/49Vc2.i). I set it up so tapping anywhere on the screen would have you walk there and to use a weapon you had to swipe up, down, left or right depending on the weapon. You could equip one in both hand to allow the player to switch between attack types. The game didn't end up playing as well as I had hoped, but I think that I was close to getting it right.
You have to completely forget about gamepads, keys, buttons, joysticks... You just have a touch screen and have to offer an app that can be controlled using just that. Any virtual joystick or on-screen buttons are just work-arounds to the main problem (you want to make a game for gamepad, but you can't use one). I think that an apps developer must focus on genres that fit well with touch screens like strategy games, puzzles, point-and-click adventures... A fighting, platform, action game as we know them simply doesn't work on phones and tablets.
